Dictionary

postliterate en · ADJ

Etymology

From post- + literate.

Meanings

1. (not-comparable) After the decline of literacy.
   • Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. 2026 July 8, Rose Horowitch, “The End of Reading Is Here”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC:
   • Those who bemoan the self-absorption of the postliterate generation will be happy to know that before the self-indulgent, amateurish blog there was the self-indulgent, amateurish log. 2008 January 20, David Kirby, “Pas de Deux”, in New York Times:
   • All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. […] A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets. 2026 March 19, Sam Kriss, “Politics After Literacy”, in Jacobin:
   • There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: […]. 2013 October 15, Neil Gaiman, “Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
   • This is a period that some people call post-literate. Reading is in decline. Standardized-test scores are in decline. 2026 February 22, Derek Thompson, “The Orality Theory of Everything”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC:
   • Writing in The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. 2025 July 28, Mary Harrington, “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Forms

Relateds

postliteracy