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literate
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  • I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste.  (source)
    literate = able to read
  • The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.  (source)
    literate = able to read and write
  • "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day."  (source)
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Show 10 more with 3 word variations
  • For a few years, she used her degree to work as a volunteer in a Philadelphia social service agency that helped pregnant, unwed mothers; then she moved on to run a weekly reading group for literate and illiterate senior citizens at the local Ewing library, which she still does today.  (source)
    literate = able to read and write
  • I'm hoping you're at least semiliterate.†  (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.
  • 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)
    literates = people who are able to read and write
  • Usha's mother, Alka, is also unusually well-educated: Although she married at age fifteen, she has a ninth-grade education and is literate.  (source)
    literate = able to read and write
  • 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)
    semiliterate = partially 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
  • I had been more or less literate when he had hired me back in 1947, thanks to Mullah Shekib, but it was through Suleiman's tutoring that my reading truly advanced, as did my writing by consequence.  (source)
    literate = able to read and write
  • 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)
    semiliterate = partially able to read and write
  • And we have a small, extremely literate power elite— the people who go into the Metaverse, basically-who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.  (source)
    literate = able to read and write (in this case computer code)
  • 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)
    semiliterate = partially able to read and write
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