| / English Dictionary |
LITERARY
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Appropriate to literature rather than everyday speech or writing
Example:
when trying to impress someone she spoke in an affected literary style
Classified under:
Similar:
formal ((of spoken and written language) adhering to traditional standards of correctness and without casual, contracted, and colloquial forms)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Knowledgeable about literature
Example:
a literary style
Classified under:
Similar:
literate (versed in literature; dealing with literature)
Derivation:
literature (the humanistic study of a body of literature)
Sense 3
Meaning:
Of or relating to or characteristic of literature
Example:
literary criticism
Classified under:
Relational adjectives (pertainyms)
Pertainym:
literature (creative writing of recognized artistic value)
Derivation:
literature (creative writing of recognized artistic value)
Context examples:
Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
A document or statement granting exclusive right to own, publish, and sell literary, musical, or artistic work, or intellectual property.
(Copyright, NCI Thesaurus)
I burnt for the more active life of the world—for the more exciting toils of a literary career—for the destiny of an artist, author, orator; anything rather than that of a priest: yes, the heart of a politician, of a soldier, of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a luster after power, beat under my curate's surplice.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Although their intention was to preserve such material as part of German cultural and literary history, and their collection was first published with scholarly notes and no illustration, the tales soon came into the possession of young readers.
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
It was much easier to chat than to study; much pleasanter to let her imagination range and work at Harriet's fortune, than to be labouring to enlarge her comprehension or exercise it on sober facts; and the only literary pursuit which engaged Harriet at present, the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the collecting and transcribing all the riddles of every sort that she could meet with, into a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper, made up by her friend, and ornamented with ciphers and trophies.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
They, the professors, were right in their literary judgments because they were successes.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Jo's book was the pride of her heart, and was regarded by her family as a literary sprout of great promise.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
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