What is "illiterate"

Usage examples of "illiterate".

Nothing written in her own hand would survive--no letters, diaries, or legal papers with her signature--nor any correspondence addressed to her by any of her family, and so, since it is also known that letters were frequently read aloud to her, there is reason to believe that Susanna Boylston Adams was illiterate.

She also attempted to converse in Ameslan with the laboratory cat, who turned out to be the only illiterate in the facility.

These Amsterdammers, his tone said, thinking everybody outside their precious town is an illiterate, perched in a hut in the middle of a howling desert.

Townsmen and merchants on top of their carriages, cavalry officers, bright in their red and gold uniforms, rough teamsters in what passed for formal dress in that level of society, illiterate shepherds from the Randau Basin and befurred mountain folk from the north, sweating in their heavy cloaks.

Like all her close acquaintances, Annie suspected Eunice was illiterate or semi-literate, but no one could ever be quite sure.

Races other than the Turkish, whose immigration in 1914 was more than one-third illiterate, include the Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Russians, Ruthenians, Italians, Lithuanians, and Roumanians.

That an illiterate Irishwoman with dirt beneath her nails had outsmarted him.

Many masters think it desirable to keep a girl illiterate in their language, thinking it makes them easier to control and puts them more at their mercy.

The illiterate may reflect on the disposition of the learned, who, amidst all the advantages of study and reflection, are commonly still diffident in their determinations: and if any of the learned be inclined, from their natural temper, to haughtiness and obstinacy, a small tincture of Pyrrhonism might abate their pride, by showing them, that the few advantages, which they may have attained over their fellows, are but inconsiderable, if compared with the universal perplexity and confusion, which is inherent in human nature.

Fields realized he was only semiliterate, bordering on illiterate, and thought how odd it must be to work among books every night without such a basic power.

At the bottom of his heart he despises foreigners, just as much as any illiterate businessman in Manchester.

To look a these testosterone-loaded bruisers you would guess that they were a bunch of illiterates who would be lucky if they could read the label on a Bud.

All this tramping around giving talks and readings, are they all illiterates?

He came out of there, his sixth novel still unplaced, but with a new job, that of Special Director of the Tantalus Press, where he went on to work about a day a week, soliciting and marking up illiterate novels, total-recall autobiographies in which no one ever went anywhere or did anything, collections of primitive verse, very long laments for dead relatives (and pets and plants), crackpot scientific treatises and, increasingly, it seemed to him, "found" dramatic monologues about manic depression and schizophrenia.

My father was an illiterate savage who spoke better English than her and had French and German, too, and wrote beautiful poems in Igbo and even though to survive in the days when Biafra was struggling for survival he worked as a house servant to an American correspondent, he was never illiterate!