Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” i.e., merely able to read and write?
A: The word “literate” meant educated or learned when it first appeared in English in the 14th century. Although the primary meaning now is able to read or write, you can still find the original sense in standard dictionaries.
Merriam-Webster includes “educated,” “cultured,” “literary”; American Heritage, “familiar with literature,” “literary”; Cambridge, “having a good education or showing it in your writing”; Collins, “intelligent and well-educated”; Webster’s New World, “well-educated,” “showing extensive knowledge, learning, or culture.”
So one could defend the use of “literate” by Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, in the Feb. 28, 2026, Times obituary. But we would have used “learned” or a similar word to avoid confusion with today’s general meaning of the adjective.
As for its etymology, “literate” originally meant “acquainted with letters or literature; erudite, learned, lettered,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED’s earliest citation refers to “a c. childer litterate” (“a hundred literate children”). From Polychronicon, John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1387, of an earlier 14th-century work by Ranulf Higden.
In the early 17th century, Oxford says, “literate” took on its “weakened” use—“able to read and write”—which is “now the usual sense.”
The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from The Description of Penbrokshire, by George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Kemes (composed in 1602-1603 and first published in 1892):
“to indorse the wittnesses names on the backe of the deede, and this to be done by the wittnesses themselves, if they were literate; otherwise by some clerke or other for them.”
The OED describes this sense of “literate” as “opposed to illiterate,” which had appeared a half-century earlier. The two terms are derived from the Latin litteratus (lettered, learned) and illiteratus (unlettered, unlearned).
Here’s the dictionary’s earliest “illiterate” citation: “No more can Iudgis, Illitturate Discus ane mater” (“No more can illiterate judges discuss [adjudicate] any matter”). From Ane Compendious and Breue Tractate (1556), a tract by the Church of Scotland minister William Lauder on the duty of kings, pastors, and judges.
Getting back to “literate,” the adjective took on a new sense in the 20th century: “competent or knowledgeable in a particular area,” such as as “politically literate,” “culturally literate,” or “computer literate.”
The first example in the OED for this sense is from a US newspaper: “The American people were busy becoming ‘politically literate’; that is, learning how to run their political system” (Boston Daily Globe, March 23, 1919).
The dictionary’s earliest citation for “computer literate” is from a 1961 lecture by the British novelist and chemist C. P. Snow about the danger of relying on computers and computer adepts to make decisions:
“It is going to take a major effort to make all scientific administrators computer-literate. It is going to be quite impossible within foreseeable time to make nonscientific administrators computer-literate.” From a report in Technology Review (July 1961) on “Men and Machines,” a conference at MIT.
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