Crossword clues for literally
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Literally \Lit"er*al*ly\, adv.
According to the primary and natural import of words; not figuratively; as, a man and his wife can not be literally one flesh.
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With close adherence to words; word by word.
So wild and ungovernable a poet can not be translated literally.
--Dryden.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1530s, "in a literal sense," from literal + -ly (2). Erroneously used in reference to metaphors, hyperbole, etc., even by writers like Dryden and Pope, to indicate "what follows must be taken in the strongest admissible sense" (1680s), which is opposite to the word's real meaning and a long step down the path to the modern misuse of it.\n\nWe have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression 'not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking', we do not hesitate to insert the very word we ought to be at pains to repudiate; ... such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. [Fowler, 1924]
Wiktionary
adv. (context speech act English) word for word; not figuratively; not as an idiom or metaphor
WordNet
adv. in a literal sense; "literally translated"; "he said so literally" [ant: figuratively]
(intensifier before a figurative expression) without exaggeration; "our eyes were literally pinned to TV during the Gulf war" [syn: virtually]
Usage examples of "literally".
Gate again, but that memory was literally ablaze with pain and he swiftly banished it.
A great many expressions of kindred tenor might easily be adduced, leaving it hardly possible to doubt as indeed we are not aware that any one does doubt that many of the Jews literally held that sin was the sole cause of bodily dissolution.
The best illustration of this is outdoor advertising, where we literally have a few seconds to gain or lose the reader.
To the apocalyptist, who literally awaits the Great Uncovering, all coincidence is synchronicity, all accident revelation.
Because we previously envisioned all matter particles and all force particles to be pointlike objects with literally no spatial extent, we were obligated to consider properties of the universe on arbitrarily short distance scales.
The watch was the newfangled bandless kind that literally tells you the time.
The watch was that newfangled bandless kind that literally tells you the time.
Roger standing up to Ingvar and Bergan until the two Grays literally forced them off Greenwich Avenue at gunpoint.
Hundreds of cargo ships carrying goods lo and from Japan, China, and ihe olher Pacific Basin counlries, scores of supertankers fully loaded wilh oil, others returning empty, literally ihousands of commercial fishing boals, and untold smaller crafls and Iheir crews, all fell prey lo ihe waves.
He saw the central headquarters of the Slavers Bod, literally painted in the blood of its workers.
But shortly after we left, one of them, who was literally filled with chicha, dropped his paddle and tumbled into a heap at the bottom of the canoe, dead drunk.
Even a diamond is not literally everlasting, and even a cistron can be cut in two by crossing-over.
The carriages, carts, barrows, sedan chairs and pedestrians were literally clogging the street, and progress slowed to a crawl.
Thus, cognitive science becomes the study of such cognitive symbolic systems, and the field of artificial intelligence takes this cognitivist hypothesis literally.
But that existence was literally consuming me by slow degrees, and could not last long.