Word.ws English Dictionary

liminary

liminary adjective: introductory or preparatory.

Adjective

liminary (comparative more liminary, superlative most liminary)

  1. (archaic) Introductory or preparatory.
    • Closely connected to the epigrammatic form of entries in alba are poems that serve as prefatory or postfatory material of early modern prints. Harm-Jan van Dam dedicates his article to this kind of liminary poetry.2017, Christoph Pieper, “Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Monasteriensis: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Münster 2012). Astrid Steiner-Weber and Karl A. E....

Forms of liminary

comparativemore liminary
superlativemost liminary

Origin of liminary

From French liminaire (“introductory”) from Latin līmināris, from līmen (“doorstep, threshold; doorway, entrance; beginning, commencement”) + -ālis (suffix forming adjectives of relationship from nouns). Līmen is possibly derived from līmus (“askew; sideways”) (possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *Heh₃l- (“to bend, bow; elbow”)) + -men (suffix forming neuter nouns of the third declension) (from Proto-Indo-European *-mn̥ (suffix forming action nouns or result nouns from verbs)).

Questions about liminary

What does liminary mean?
Liminary means introductory or preparatory.
What part of speech is liminary?
Liminary is an adjective.

Words near liminary in the dictionary

  1. liminal
  2. liminal space
  3. liminal spaces
  4. liminalities
  5. liminality
  6. liminary
  7. liminess
  8. liming
  9. limings
  10. Limington
  11. liminocentric

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: liminary (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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