 5 definitions found
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
literal
adjective
1: being or reflecting the essential or genuine character of
something; "her actual motive"; "a literal solitude
like a desert"- G.K.Chesterton; "a genuine dilemma"
[syn: {actual}, {genuine}, {real}]
2: without interpretation or embellishment; "a literal
translation of the scene before him"
3: limited to the explicit meaning of a word or text; "a
literal translation" [ant: {figurative}]
4: lacking stylistic embellishment; "a literal description";
"wrote good but plain prose"; "a plain unadorned account
of the coronation"; "a forthright unembellished style"
[syn: {plain}, {unembellished}]
5: of the clearest kind; usually used for emphasis; "it's the
literal truth"; "a matter of investment, pure and simple"
[syn: {pure and simple}]
6: (of a translation) corresponding word for word with the
original; "literal translation of the article"; "an
awkward word-for-word translation" [syn: {word-for-word}]
noun: a mistake in printed matter resulting from mechanical
failures of some kind [syn: {misprint}, {erratum}, {typographical
error}, {typo}, {literal error}]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Literal \Lit"er*al\, noun
Literal meaning. [Obs.] --Sir T. Browne.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Literal \Lit"er*al\ (l[i^]t"[~e]r*al), adjective [F. lit['e]ral,
litt['e]ral, L. litteralis, literalis, fr. littera, litera, a
letter. See {Letter}.]
1. According to the letter or verbal expression; real; not
figurative or metaphorical; as, the literal meaning of a
phrase.
It hath but one simple literal sense whose light the
owls can not abide. --Tyndale.
2. Following the letter or exact words; not free.
A middle course between the rigor of literal
translations and the liberty of paraphrasts.
--Hooker.
3. Consisting of, or expressed by, letters.
The literal notation of numbers was known to
Europeans before the ciphers. --Johnson.
4. Giving a strict or literal construction; unimaginative;
matter-of-fact; -- applied to persons.
{Literal contract} (Law), a contract of which the whole
evidence is given in writing. --Bouvier.
{Literal equation} (Math.), an equation in which known
quantities are expressed either wholly or in part by means
of letters; -- distinguished from a {numerical equation}.
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
150 Moby Thesaurus words for "literal":
Christian, abecedarian, accepted, allographic, alphabetic,
approved, arid, authentic, authoritative, barren, basic, bona fide,
boring, candid, canonical, capital, card-carrying, colorless,
conventional, correct, customary, denotative, dictionary, dinkum,
down-to-earth, dry, dull, earthbound, essential, etymological,
evangelical, exact, faithful, firm, following the letter, genuine,
good, graphemic, honest, honest-to-God, humdrum, ideographic,
inartificial, infecund, infertile, lawful, legitimate, lettered,
lexical, lexigraphic, lifelike, literatim, logogrammatic,
logographic, lower-case, majuscule, matter-of-fact, minuscular,
minuscule, mundane, natural, naturalistic, objective, of the faith,
original, orthodox, orthodoxical, pictographic, precise, proper,
prosaic, prosing, prosy, pure, real, realistic, received, right,
rightful, scriptural, semantic, simon-pure, simple, simplistic,
sincere, sound, staid, standard, sterling, stolid, strict, stuffy,
sure-enough, tedious, textual, traditional, traditionalistic,
transliterated, true, true to life, true to nature,
true to reality, true-blue, unadulterated, unaffected, unassumed,
unassuming, unbiased, uncial, uncolored, uncomplicated,
unconcocted, uncopied, uncounterfeited, undisguised, undisguising,
undistorted, unembellished, unexaggerated, unfabricated,
unfanciful, unfeigned, unfeigning, unfictitious, unflattering,
unideal, unimaginative, unimagined, unimitated, uninspired,
uninvented, uninventive, unoriginal, unpoetic, unprejudiced,
unpretended, unpretending, unqualified, unromantic, unromanticized,
unsimulated, unspecious, unsynthetic, unvarnished, upper-case,
verbal, verbatim, veridical, verisimilar, word-for-word
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:
literal
A constant made available to a process, by
inclusion in the executable text. Most modern systems do not
allow texts to modify themselves during execution, so literals
are indeed constant; their value is written at compile-time
and is read-only at run time.
In contrast, values placed in variables or files and accessed
by the process via a symbolic name, can be changed during
execution. This may be an asset. For example, messages can
be given in a choice of languages by placing the translation
in a file.
Literals are used when such modification is not desired. The
name of the file mentioned above (not its content), or a
physical constant such as 3.14159, might be coded as a
literal. Literals can be accessed quickly, a potential
advantage of their use.
(1996-01-23)
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