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Literate   Listen
adjective
Literate  adj.  Instructed in learning, science, or literature; learned; lettered. "The literate now chose their emperor, as the military chose theirs."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Literate" Quotes from Famous Books



... however you'll recall that our training was deliberately made such that each man spreads over several fields. This in case, during our half century without contact, one or more of us meets with accident. Besides, the Pedagogue's library is such that any literate can soon become effective in any field to the extent needed ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... benefits from rich natural resources, a highly literate population, an export-oriented agricultural sector, and a diversified industrial base. However, when President Carlos MENEM took office in 1989, the country had piled up huge external debts, inflation had reached 200% per month, and output was plummeting. ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... contempt, not only of the literary class, but of literature itself, and resorted to extreme measures of coercion. The writers took up the gage of battle thrown down by the emperor, and Hwangti became the object of the wit and abuse of every literate who could use a pencil. His birth was aspersed. It was said that he was not a Tsin at all, that his origin was of the humblest, and that he was a substituted child foisted on the last of the Tsin princes. These personal ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... typical woman by the notion of marriage has been noted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of sex, from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and Shaw. That It is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is surely no evidence against it. What we ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... sending up new suckers from the old root in spite of us. It is only from its roots in the living generations of men that a language can be reinforced with fresh vigor for its needs; what may be called a literate dialect grows ever more and more pedantic and foreign, till it becomes at last as unfitting a vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. That we should all be made to talk like books is the danger with which we are threatened ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... very early in the evening." Poets, we know, often "heard the chimes at midnight" in Elia's day, and the plea has certainly a most Lamb-like ring. That the Company's directors, however, were more than content with the service of their literate ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... order thinks of setting himself to make money; to enter the service of the government is his object, and to achieve this he studies literature. There is practically no barrier in China to becoming a "literate," and the classification means all that the word "gentleman" can in Europe. For this and other reasons thousands of men in Canton wear horn-rimmed spectacles, look wise, and discuss mundane affairs in a manner brooking no contention. The literary bureaucracy of Canton wields a mighty influence ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... lot of mish-mash in the course of this education. For instance, it is one thing to study English, its composition, spelling, vocabulary, construction, rules and regulations. One must learn these things if he is to be considered literate. In the course of such study, one also becomes acquainted with English literature. With literature it is enough to merely be acquainted with the subject. One need not know the works of Chaucer or Spenser intimately—unless one is preparing to specialize in the English literature of the writers ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... the people in its territory must learn to use it as such before its influence goes far abroad. English, French, and German, and they alone, have reached this point. French and German have no new country, and practically the whole of their country is now literate; their relative share in the world's reading can only increase as their population increases. Spanish and Russian, on the other hand, have both new country and room for a much higher percentage ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... any man who awoke that morning to the brutal realities of life. If only for the shame of it! How must they be speaking of him, Amy's relatives, and her friends? A novelist who couldn't write novels; a husband who couldn't support his wife and child; a literate who made eager application for illiterate work at paltry wages—how interesting it would all sound in humorous gossip! And what hope had he that things would ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... huddled mass of humanity, literate and illiterate, of all ages, of all conditions, and none laughed, none grinned, none smiled, none spoke—all that was past. They stopped, they moved again—as the Flopper stopped and moved. Occasionally a child cried out—occasionally ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... together: more than five waggon loads; a veritable hoard, overflowing into the hall of his house, and into his bedroom, where he steps over them to get to his couch. He was a man "of small learning," says Murimuth; "passably literate," writes Chambre; at the best, according to Petrarch, "of ardent temperament, not ignorant of literature, with a natural curiosity for out-of-the- way lore": an antiquarian, not of the lovable kind, but unscrupulous, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... educationalist, we should not think it strange to meet an educational missionary on tour, doing evangelistic educational work. Evangelistic work is educational to the core, and it leads to educational results. No evangelistic work amongst an illiterate, or a literate, people can be really complete, if it does not lead at once to the organisation of education amongst the converts and hearers. The illiterate must be taught to read the Gospels, and it demands an expert in the teaching of illiterates to direct ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen

... blame, as an extraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too acrid to be bruited about. In other words, this mass of platitudes took Americans by surprise, and somehow shocked them. What was commonplace to even the peasants of the European Continent was so unfamiliar to even the literate minority over here that the book acquired a sort of sinister repute, and the writer himself came to be discussed as a fellow with the habit of arising in decorous society and indelicately ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... he had spent two years as chemist at the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain, but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance them. "The mines are Baird's, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a surface into itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term 'hairy' with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... its perfect grace, its calm and almost childlike simplicity, a power for individual and general good. "It combines all the fascination of a fairy tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey, children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love a fairy tale—all might read it or listen to it, without tedium." Every one will draw from it what ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... ball was unusually brilliant, experts said, and nothing made the Parisians aware that on the night of January 12th, 1840, Felix d'Aubremel had passed sentence of death on Chinaman Li, son of Mung, son of Tseu, a literate mandarin ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... There are few literate persons in Russia who do not know whole pages of this poem by heart. It will live as long as Russian literature exists; and its artistic value as an instrument for the depiction of Russian nature and the soul of the Russian people can be compared only with that ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov

... according to the signatures on 1,699,985 marriage-records.—In the "Dictionnaire de pedagogie et d'instruction primaire," published by M. Buisson, M. Maggiolo, director of these vast statistics, has given the proportion of literate and illiterate people for the different departments; now, from department to department, the figures furnished by the signatures on marriage records correspond with sufficient exactness to the number of schools, verified moreover by pastoral visits and by other documents. The most ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... us that the Russian monk, RASPUTIN, "started life as an illiterate peasant." But, we would ask, is there really anything remarkable in this? We believe that the number of persons who have been born literate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various

... for educational programmes, Shabalov knew the educational business badly. It would be truer to say that he did not know it at all. He was hardly interested in it. He was not even very literate. He received his inspector's position as a reward for his piety, patriotism, and correct mode of thinking, rather than for his labours in the interest of public instruction. He had served in his youth as a class assistant in the gymnasia. There, by a steady attendance at the gymnasia chapel ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... to give, all drawn from memories of childhood. Wonderful how these quaint phrases stick—due, I suppose, to the fact that the child does not hear too much to confuse it, and when in this tenacious stage notices the sharp differences between the conversation of the literate, as encountered in the dining-room and drawing-room, and the much more amusing illiteracy below stairs. It will be a bad day for England when education is so prevalent that nursemaids have it too. Much less interesting will ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... were lured from their classrooms to lecture before ladies' clubs hitherto sacred to the accents of transoceanic celebrities and Eleanor Roosevelt. There they competed on alternate forums with literate gardeners and stuttering horticultural amateurs. Stolon, rhizome and culm became words replacing crankshaft and piston in the popular vocabulary; the puerile reports Gootes fabricated under my name as the man responsible for the phenomenon were syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... vocabulary and which are none the less abhorrent to our speech habits. The most that is likely to happen is that they may shed their accents and more or less approximate an English pronunciation, dee-noo-meant, perhaps, and inn-je-new, an approximation which will be sternly resisted by the literate. I well remember one occasion when I overheard scorn poured upon a charming American actress who had happened to mention the date of her own deb-you ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English

... of a probable anybody. Just in the nick, neither too early to be tedious, nor too late to sit a reasonable time. He is a most pleasant hand: a fine rattling fellow, has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; himself hugely literate, oppressively full of information in all stuff of conversation, from matter of fact to Xenophon and Plato—can talk Greek with Porson, politics with Thelwall, conjecture with George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything with anybody: ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... Scandinavia of a generation ago, it was the drama again. At present America is in the grip of the short story—so thoroughly in its grip indeed that, in addition to all the important writers, nearly all the literate population who are not writing movie scenarios are writing or are about to write short stories. One reason for this is the general belief that this highly sophisticated and subtle art is a means ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... selected candidates, or groups of candidates, is the unforeseen and unavoidable mechanical defect of all electoral methods with large electorates. Education has nothing to do with that. The elections for the English University members are manipulated just as much as the elections in the least literate of the Irish constituencies. [Footnote: There is a very suggestive book on this aspect of our general question, The Crowd, by M. Gustave le Bon, which should interest any one who finds this paper interesting. And the English reader who would like a fuller treatment of this ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells



Words linked to "Literate" :   someone, literary, somebody, alphabetiser, writer, educated, person, illiterate, sophisticated, literate person, reader, alphabetizer, mortal, soul



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