Word.ws English Dictionary

literal-minded

literal-minded adjective: tending to take things literally, without understanding subtext, etc.

Adjective

literal-minded (comparative more literal-minded, superlative most literal-minded)

  1. Tending to take things literally, without understanding subtext, etc.
    • When spiritual knowledge is lost, then literal-minded fools go around slaying relatives or cutting out hearts and lifting them up to the sun.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 231

Forms of literal-minded

comparativemore literal-minded
superlativemost literal-minded

Questions about literal-minded

What does literal-minded mean?
Literal-minded means tending to take things literally, without understanding subtext, etc.
What part of speech is literal-minded?
Literal-minded is an adjective.

Words near literal-minded in the dictionary

  1. literages
  2. literal
  3. literal rule
  4. literal theonymy
  5. literal who
  6. literal-minded
  7. literalisation
  8. literalisations
  9. literalise
  10. literalised
  11. literaliser

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: literal-minded (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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Cite this entry: “literal-minded.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/literal-minded. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.