Word.ws English Dictionary

readerly

readerly adjective: characteristic of readers.

Adjective

readerly (comparative more readerly, superlative most readerly)

  1. Characteristic of readers.
    • It+was+an+extraordinary+display+of+true+readerly+love+—+a+bunch+of+buffs+giving+a+contemporary+genre+writer+the+Shakespearean+variorum+treatment+on+their+own+time.2009 July 19, Carlo Rotella, “The Genre Artist”, in New York Times
  2. Of or relating to the reader.
    • Nevertheless, the dream element and over power to haunt come at a certain readerly price. The poem abounds in passages that will leave an unprepared audience bewildered.1999, Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, in Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page xiii

Forms of readerly

comparativemore readerly
superlativemost readerly

Origin of readerly

From reader + -ly.

Words formed from readerly

Questions about readerly

What does readerly mean?
Readerly means characteristic of readers.
What part of speech is readerly?
Readerly is an adjective.

Words near readerly in the dictionary

  1. readerdom
  2. readeress
  3. readeresses
  4. readerless
  5. readerlessness
  6. readerly
  7. readers
  8. readers-writers problem
  9. readership
  10. readerships
  11. readest

Source and license

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