letteral
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
letter + -al. The Lojban sense was coined by James Cooke Brown by analogy with numeral.
Adjective[edit]
letteral (not comparable)
- (historical) Referring to a type of musical notation used by Shakers, based on letters instead of notes.
- (rare) Regarding letters of the alphabet.
- 2001, Tom Cohen, “Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man, and Secret Agency in the "Aesthetic State"”, in Material events: Paul de Man and the afterlife of theory, page 117:
- [A certain effect is achieved] by a letter, by “old man R”, as the master agent is alone named […] Thus, when Hitchcock repeats certain names and syllabic or even letteral patterns across his films, they appear to link up in active networks […] Such repetitions isolate specific signifiers—individual letters or letteral clusters, sounds […] , visual “puns”, and citations—which may operate like monadic and nomadic switchboards whose proliferation continues to alter the afterlife not only of the film texts themselves […] but the literary or cultural mnemonics that they have become embedded in.
Noun[edit]
letteral (plural letterals)
- (printing) Obsolete form of literal (“a misprint that affects a letter”).
- 1898, Charles Thomas Jacobi, Printing: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Typography as Applied More Particularly to the Printing of Books, pages 57–58:
- In order to avoid the character of being slovenly, always read the lines as composed. This should be done as soon as they are finished and before spacing out; in time the habit will become so fixed, that in spacing out, or even in composing the line, the eye will wander over the words, and detect any letterals.
- [1971, Ruth Kimball Kent, The Language of Journalism: A Glossary of Print-communications Terms, page 82:
- LITERALS type characters: to read proof for literals is to read letter for letter, watching for proper spelling, punctuation, etc., as well as for typos: formerly spelled letterals.]
- (Lojban) The name of a letter, such as gy. for the letter G.
Related terms[edit]
Translations[edit]
the name of a letter