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Definition 2024


textbook

textbook

English

Noun

textbook (plural textbooks)

  1. A coursebook, a formal manual of instruction in a specific subject, especially one for use in schools or colleges.

Translations

Adjective

textbook (comparative more textbook, superlative most textbook)

  1. Of or pertaining to textbooks or their style, especially in being dry and pedagogical; textbooky, textbooklike.
    • 1917, George Ransom Twiss, A textbook in the principles of science teaching‎
      It is likely to kill interest, and give both teacher and pupils a didactic, textbook attitude at the very beginning.
    • 2000, Okasha El Daly, Janet Starkey, Desert travellers: from Herodotus to T.E. Lawrence‎
      They are mentioned in his flat, textbook voice, alongside schoolroom descriptions of topography and assessments of economic significance.
    • 2004, David Henn, Old Spain and new Spain: the travel narratives of Camilo José Cela‎
      ...a kind of descriptive account or a social, geographical, anthropological, or historical commentary that may at times have a certain textbook tone to it.
  2. Having the typical characteristics of some class of phenomenon, so that it might be included as an example in a textbook.
    • 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Three, Chapter 2,
      All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.
    • 1997, Alexander De Waal, Famine crimes: politics and the disaster relief industry in Africa‎
      It was a textbook case of how prompt government action could avert a major crisis.
    • 2003, Felice Picano, A house on the ocean, a house on the bay‎
      Every night had been clear and star-studded, the progression of the moon through its phases absolutely textbook, its dance with the planets visible in the ecliptic...
    • 2003, Robert J Art, Patrick M Cronin, The United States and coercive diplomacy‎
      In many ways the Korean nuclear crisis is a textbook example of coercive diplomacy — its strengths as well as the risks inherent in such a strategy.
    • 2016 October 10, Melissa Rauch as Bernadette, “The Cohabitation Experimentation”, in The Big Bang Theory, season 10, episode 4:
      It would help if you would stop telling me I have a textbook cervix.

Translations

Quotations

  • For usage examples of this term, see Citations:textbook.