Word.ws English Dictionary

protoliterate

protoliterate adjective: with written language that is in its early stages.

Adjective (1)

protoliterate (not comparable)

  1. With written language that is in its early stages.
    • Knowledge of a "fact" and its institutionalization in a society are quite distinct: murder, for example, was probably "discovered" in the Pliocene, but the institutionalization of murder in warfare does not seem to have occurred until the late Neolithic or the protoliterate period.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 131
  2. In the early stages of learning to read and write.

Adjective (2) capitalized: Protoliterate

Protoliterate (not comparable)

  1. (historical) Of or related to the Protoliterate period.

Forms of protoliterate

alternative formproto-literate

Origin of protoliterate

From proto- + literate.

From Protoliterate period.

Words formed from protoliterate

Questions about protoliterate

What does protoliterate mean?
Protoliterate means with written language that is in its early stages.
What part of speech is protoliterate?
Protoliterate is an adjective.

Words near protoliterate in the dictionary

  1. protolinguistic
  2. protolinguistics
  3. protolipid
  4. protolipids
  5. protoliteracy
  6. protoliterate
  7. Protoliterate period
  8. protolith
  9. protolithic
  10. protoliths
  11. protoliturgical

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: protoliterate (page history and authors); Protoliterate (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: “protoliterate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/protoliterate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.