Textual

adj

adj ·3 syllables ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of or pertaining to text.; Of or pertaining to textuality.

    "On any given Friday night at the Claremont Colleges, between 15 and 20 Jewish students gather to sing wordless melodies, dive into textual study of Talmud or James Baldwin, or hold workshops on antisemitism."

  2. 2
    Of or pertaining to text.; Of or pertaining to text as opposed to other document elements.

    "I see that the editor revised the document's metadata, headers, and images, but I don't see any textual changes."

  3. 3
    Pertaining to text messages, by analogy with sexual: textual harassment, textual intercourse; compare sexting.
Adjective
  1. 1
    of or relating to or based on a text wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
acceptedapocalypticapostolicapprovedauthenticauthoritative

Example

More examples

"Each picture in the blog includes textual descriptions for blind readers."

Etymology

From Middle English textewell, textueel, textuel, textuele, tixtuel (“learned in texts, bookish”), possibly from Latin textuālis; also compare Middle French textuele; or perhaps a coinage by Chaucer from Latin textus and Middle English -el. English spelling conformed to Latin from late 15c. By surface analysis, text + -ual.

Related phrases

textual criticismtext messagetextual harassmenttextual intercourse

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.