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Webster 1913 Edition


Written

Writ′ten

,
p.
p.
of
Write
,
Verb.

Webster 1828 Edition


Written

WRITTEN

,
pp.
Expressed in letters.
Written laws, statutes; laws enacted by the supreme power and recorded; as contradistinguished from unwritten or common law.

Definition 2024


written

written

English

Adjective

written (comparative more written, superlative most written)

  1. Of, relating or characteristic of writing (i.e., of that which has been written)
    I can speak Japanese fairly well, but I have no understanding whatsoever of written Japanese.
  2. That was written.

Derived terms

Quotations

  • 1978, Jacques Derrida; Alan Bass, Writing and Difference, page 62:
    It is more written than said
  • 1991, Jay Clayton; Eric Rothstein, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History‎, page 109:
    ... although certainly more written than oral, are radically implicated in orality because of their performative nature and susceptibility to "mouvance"
  • 1994, Marvin L. Kalb, The Nixon Memo: Political Respectability, Russia, and the Press‎, page 68:
    Strmecki reworked the draft, making it seem "more written than spoken."
  • 1996, Richard M. Swiderski, The Metamorphosis of English: Versions of Other Languages‎, page 83:
    The Chinese is more written than the English in that the writing is more removed from speech than the phonetic English.
  • 1998, Ilana Snyder; Michael Joyce, Page to Screen: Taking Literacy Into the Electronic Era‎, page 96:
    Yates concludes that in terms of lexical density, 'CMC users package information in text in ways that are more written than speech-like'
  • 1998, Charles Bernstein, Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word‎, page 211:
    printed in caps to suggest that the whole performance be thought of as one gigantic sentence. If Silliman's talk is more written than spoken, ...
  • 2003, Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2004‎, page 71:
    Even insults, when they are traded, seem more written than felt.

Antonyms

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

written

  1. past participle of write
    Has your girlfriend written you a letter yet?
    • 2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist:
      The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, [] . Scribes, illuminators, and scholars held such stones directly over manuscript pages as an aid in seeing what was being written, drawn, or read.

Statistics

Most common English words before 1923: can't · ready · ought · #443: written · arms · across · answer