Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Characteristic of or appropriate to everyday language.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective not literary

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective marked by lack of affectation or pedantry

Etymologies

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Examples

  • In the samples you've provided, the political commitment of the literary right is clearly extraliterary, or rather nonliterary, that is, tone deaf to the novel, a conclusion readily argued from the premises of the New criticism concerning ambiguity in narrative voice.

    The politics of the politics of literature 2008

  • And you may also have noticed that I don't treat "nonliterary" and "unpopular" as value judgments.

    Commercial vs Literary (again) Editorial Anonymous 2008

  • But in what sense are these nonliterary objects "texts"?

    Literary Study 2009

  • He built it out perfectly to his specifications, but it's based totally on nonliterary verse.

    Susan Segal: Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding) Susan Segal 2011

  • These days, the state-run agency has more pressing, nonliterary concerns.

    NYC subway service ads replace poetry, literature 2010

  • It's surprisingly easy to translate nonliterary work into words.

    APAture Live 2008

  • If I were credible enough to have my own blog, here are five nonliterary but literate blogs I read regularly which would have a place on my blogroll:

    Five blogs that would be on my blogroll if I only had a blog 2007

  • At one point she relates to a distinctly nonliterary character: Anna Nicole Smith, who, when she dies of a drug overdose in February 2007, is taking many of the medications that the author is taking.

    When Pain Comes to Stay 2009

  • If I were credible enough to have my own blog, here are five nonliterary but literate blogs I read regularly which would have a place on my blogroll:

    July 2007 2007

  • What we get instead is Wilson on the road (from Hungary to the Mideast), among literary friends (Robert Lowell, Anais Nin, W.H. Auden), and nonliterary (Mike Nichols and Elaine May) and, increasingly, alone and worrying over his heart condition, his drinking and his dwindling but still intense sex life.

    A Summer Book Bag 2008

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