Word.ws English Dictionary

postliteracy

postliteracy noun: the decline of literacy.

Noun

postliteracy (countable and uncountable, plural postliteracies)

  1. The decline of literacy.
    • The conventional wisdom is that the American public has lost faith in the humanities—and lost both competence and interest in reading and writing, possibly heralding a post-literacy age.2024 October 23, Tyler Austin Harper, “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College”, in The Atlantic
    • Pundits—responding to the rise of streaming, AI, climate change, and Trump himself—have announced the dawn of post-literacy, post-humanism, and post-neoliberalism.2025 February 12, Spencer Kornhaber, “The Game That Shows We’re Thinking About History All Wrong”, in The Atlantic, retrieved 12 Apr 2026

Forms of postliteracy

pluralpostliteracies
alternative formpost-literacy

Origin of postliteracy

post- + literacy

Questions about postliteracy

What does postliteracy mean?
Postliteracy means the decline of literacy.
What part of speech is postliteracy?
Postliteracy is a noun.
What is the plural of postliteracy?
The plural of postliteracy is postliteracies.

Words near postliteracy in the dictionary

  1. postliminy
  2. postlingual
  3. postlingually
  4. postlinguistic
  5. postlinguistically
  6. postliteracy
  7. postliterary
  8. postliterate
  9. postlitigation
  10. postlockdown
  11. postlockout

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: postliteracy (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: “postliteracy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/postliteracy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.