Literal may refer to:
- Literal and figurative language, taken in a non-figurative sense
- Literal translation, the close adherence to the forms of a source language text
- Literal legal interpretations also referred to as Strict constructionism and the literal or plain meaning rule
- Terminal symbol in regular expressions and in descriptions of formal grammars
- Literal (mathematical logic), an elementary proposition or its negation in logical expressions
- Literal (computer programming), a notation for representing a value within programming language source code
- Literal (magazine), a quarterly bilingual magazine
- A typographical error, normally to one letter or number
- A chunk of input data that is represented "as is" in data compressed using data compression
Famous quotes containing the word literal:
“All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The literal alternatives to [abortion] are suicide, motherhood, and, some would add, madness. Consequently, there is some confusion, discomfort, and cynicism greeting efforts to “find” or “emphasize” or “identify” alternatives to abortion.”
—Connie J. Downey (b. 1934)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)