dynamic
toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

literate
in a sentence

show 65 more with this conextual meaning
  • All along, Enrique's mother has written very little; she is barely literate and embarrassed by it.†   (source)
  • With that, Eragon began the task of becoming literate.†   (source)
  • The minister was literate.†   (source)
  • Clara was in such a hurry to make her literate that at the age of five the little girl was already reading the newspaper over breakfast and discussing the news with her grandfather.†   (source)
  • Some of them, but not many, were even literate.†   (source)
  • It'll be like you're literate.†   (source)
  • The Chinook Bookshop, toward the north end, is as fiercely independent as they come — the sort of literate and civilized bookstore going out of business nationwide.†   (source)
  • You know, 'literate,' 'adult,' thrilling'—that sort of thing.†   (source)
  • My formal Spanish must have sounded as pretentious to the ears of the paisano as "Whither goeth my sire?" would have sounded to a semi-literate Ozark mountaineer.†   (source)
  • They had called the college paper, and someone had told them I was halfway literate.†   (source)
  • In front of one of the benevolent associations, a literate man was chanting the Gold Mountain News, which was taped to the window.†   (source)
  • Someone from Pakistan helping me become computer literate so I could help Pakistani kids get literate.†   (source)
  • In Mandarin a literate person knows six thousand characters, but with no Chinese alphabet, the language cannot easily be entered through the twenty-six-button alphabetic keyboards of Western computers.†   (source)
  • Even a brother who spoke with the smooth tongue of a literate man as opposed to his own coarse words.†   (source)
  • We were fully literate in nu shu, and when we were apart we wrote each other almost daily.†   (source)
  • He listens as Lincoln talks of extending suffrage to literate blacks and those who fought for the Union.†   (source)
  • One, I was a proper snob in college, as only an old Wise Child alumnus and future lifetime English-major can be, and I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.†   (source)
  • Pre-literate too.†   (source)
  • I'll be one of the few demonstrably literate people ever to graduate from this school, Colonel.†   (source)
  • He has always associated with the learned, the gentle, the literate, and the reasonable both in France and in America.†   (source)
  • Mary Alice is sensitive, literate, which is to say, widely read in one or two of the same book in which I have an interest, has a decent sense of humor (hardly a barrel of laughs, but then, who could be in the shadow of Jack Brown's wit), seems relatively advanced and liberated in "worldly" matters for a girl of her background, which is intensely Southern.†   (source)
  • Sober, literate.†   (source)
  • He told me all he knew of course, he said, remembering, with the feeling that he would never forget it, the awed, calm, kind, rural face and the slow, careful, half-literate voice.†   (source)
  • The letter was barely literate, but its message was clearly elaborated and needed no translation.   (source)
    literate = as though written by someone able to read and write
  • Their parents are not influential, literate, or vocal, so this educational system is perpetuated.   (source)
    literate = able to read and write
  • The memos that came from above telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him because they'd been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at AnooYoo was capable of appreciating how clever he had been.   (source)
    literates = people who are able to read and write
  • * The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture.   (source)
    literate = able to read and write
  • Always a few literate junkies.   (source)
  • I asked the eighth graders and the other kids who appeared the least bit literate to retell the story in their own words on paper.   (source)
  • By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate in some degree.   (source)
  • "So, Brawne," he said, "how come you're getting information-literate in your old age?†   (source)
  • Dai Manju's parents were elementary school dropouts and barely literate.†   (source)
  • Some 89 percent of Sri Lankan women are literate, compared to just 43 percent across South Asia.†   (source)
  • ...I'm working with two ranking commissars, neither of whom can remotely speak French-they can't even speak literate Russian, but that's the way it is sometimes.†   (source)
  • ...My lover was no evil man, no blind follower of the regime, but a literate man, a gentle man, and a believer in eternal China!†   (source)
  • And when Syed found out why Mortenson wanted to type letters, he sat Mortenson in front of an Apple Macintosh and gave him a series of free tutorials until his new friend was computer literate.†   (source)
  • I had made the greatest mistake for a woman literate in nu shu: I had not considered texture, context, and shades of meaning.†   (source)
  • The students spent their days studying "the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed and the basics of Islamic law as interpreted by their barely literate teachers," he writes.†   (source)
  • It's a funny thing that although my mother-in-law was extremely literate in nu shu—perhaps because she was so familiar with such a variety of characters—singing and chanting had not been very important to her.†   (source)
  • Until women are numerate and literate, it is difficult for them to start businesses or contribute meaningfully to their national economies.†   (source)
  • They were all kinds of men—literate men and ignorant men, clean men and dirty men—but all of them had restlessness in common.†   (source)
  • Neither was it because he was more literate than the rest.†   (source)
  • Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius: "This above all: to thine own self be true."†   (source)
  • You may see that a beautiful woman is inferior to a non-beautiful one, that the literate is inferior to the illiterate, that the rich is inferior to the poor, and the able to the incompetent.†   (source)
  • Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world; so that I could if I liked to take the trouble, write a great deal here not only about my mother and father but about uncles and aunts, cousins and friends.†   (source)
  • The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 — and so it went on.†   (source)
  • In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.†   (source)
  • For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.†   (source)
  • The German literate reversed this process with the profane French literature.†   (source)
  • The poor child was hardly literate.†   (source)
  • If Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie.†   (source)
  • Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no human hand can improve?†   (source)
  • There were very few resident landlords in the neighborhood and also very few domestic or literate serfs, and in the lives of the peasantry of those parts the mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian people, the causes and meaning of which are so baffling to contemporaries, were more clearly and strongly noticeable than among others.†   (source)
  • The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.†   (source)
  • It was many months later before I learned how Piedmont had probably handled vexing problems with the semiliterate though obstinate workers who greased looms on the midnight shift and rocked the vessel of obedience in defiance of the invisible capitalists who ruled the mills from far away.   (source)
    semiliterate = partially able to read and write
    standard prefix: The prefix "semi-" in semiliterate means half or partially. This is the same pattern you see in words like semicircle, semisweet, and semiautomatic.
  • I'm hoping you're at least semiliterate.†   (source)
  • There was not the shadow of a doubt in anybody's mind that the guilty one was from Tres Marias, but the rural police simply recorded that bit of information in their record book with the tortured hand of the semiliterate, adding that the victims had been caught committing a theft.†   (source)
  • A semiliterate farmer in the 66th Indiana admitted to his brother in 1864 that "I am tierd of ware ...but not Discuraged I am moer Deturmin to Day than I ever was ...I don't want to see the ware Stop until the ...Stars and Strips waves over Every Precinct in America."†   (source)
  • A semiliterate private in the 54th Pennsylvania, whose wife had rebuked him for thinking more of the Union than of her and the children, wrote to her with some asperity that "if the rebels would invade the north whad whoud become of you and my children ...thay woud be perfeck slaves thay whoud be triede like a doge ...and hour property wodden be worth a cent for thay wold take it to pay thair dates."†   (source)
  • I spent those years prowling the slums of Baltimore, studying the psychology of cops, watching people's homes burn, deciphering semiliterate police reports of dented fenders and suicides, and hanging around accident wards listening to people die.†   (source)
  • Some of the stewards (there were semiliterate foremen among them) listened with alarm, supposing these words to mean that the young count was displeased with their management and embezzlement of money, some after their first fright were amused by Pierre's lisp and the new words they had not heard before, others simply enjoyed hearing how the master talked, while the cleverest among them, including the chief steward, understood from this speech how they could best handle the master for their own ends.†   (source)
  • The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere speaks of "the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate American."†   (source)
  • Such of them as were literate enough [Pg312] to send in their votes were almost unanimously against a change.†   (source)
  • [2] Thus it was that the Romance languages were fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, the vast [Pg179] influence of the literate minority to the contrary notwithstanding†   (source)
  • [Pg177] VI The Common Speech § 1 /Grammarians and Their Ways/—So far, in the main, the language examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious variety—the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least of literate men†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)