as in ignorant
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Recent Examples of functionally illiterate
For 32 years of his life, the personal trainer was functionally illiterate.
—
Clare Mulroy, USA Today, 25 Feb. 2026
Stillman, like Goodnow and many other teachers, noted that AI can help tailor her lessons for students of different abilities, creating more-advanced activities for higher-performing students and more-basic tasks for students who are functionally illiterate in English.
—Jared Perlo, NBC news, 22 Dec. 2025
Clare Mulroy, USA Today, 25 Feb. 2026
Stillman, like Goodnow and many other teachers, noted that AI can help tailor her lessons for students of different abilities, creating more-advanced activities for higher-performing students and more-basic tasks for students who are functionally illiterate in English.
—Jared Perlo, NBC news, 22 Dec. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for functionally illiterate
Adjective
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Their earliest performances could be fun and irreverent, too, but Boy George says they were also marred by ignorant, homophobic heckling.—
Jon Blistein,
Rolling Stone,
14 June 2026
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And using both words does not reveal that a person is ignorant but rather cosmopolitan.—
Kirk Bowman,
The Conversation,
4 June 2026
Adjective
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Stolen bases, once treated as a reckless relic of the uneducated past, are at levels not seen since the freewheeling 1980s.—
Chad Jennings,
New York Times,
21 May 2026
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The animals help Tim, who proves uneducated in the methods of deduction, investigate a series of local suspects portrayed by Molly Gordon, Hong Chau, Emma Thompson, Kobna Holbrook-Smith, Nicholas Galitzine, Tosin Cole and Conleth Hill, among others.—
Tommy McArdle,
PEOPLE,
7 May 2026
Adjective
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Many of these Catholic newcomers, fleeing famine and persecution, were disparaged as poor, illiterate and superstitious.—
Matthew Smith,
The Conversation,
8 June 2026
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At the time, forty percent of the country (including my mother, my sisters and me) was illiterate, and music was our speech, our religion.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
6 May 2026
Adjective
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Such a practice would have been especially useful in nonliterate societies where knowledge was transmitted orally.—
Amanda Fortini,
New York Times,
12 Nov. 2020
Adjective
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But this time there would be no panel from the National Endowment of the Arts sifting through the applications, no oversight from cultural officials and benighted curators—the usual process.—
Nate Freeman,
Vanity Fair,
8 May 2026
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He’s introduced it to diners in formerly benighted, hash-less regions, including Texas.—
Robert F. Moss,
Southern Living,
16 Apr. 2026
Adjective
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De-Stalinization was quick and brutal, with history having the last say — a lesson guaranteed to go unlearned.—
Voice of the People,
New York Daily News,
15 Feb. 2026
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Peeta explained unlearned stimuli cause AVs to simply stop.—
Doug Turnbull,
AJC.com,
25 Jan. 2026
Adjective
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No untutored voice, nor even sound of rushing car disturbed the seemingly sacred stillness of the hour.—
Erin Alberty,
Axios,
14 Apr. 2025
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His savage, untutored mind suggested no better way than that of wreaking vengeance upon those who had wronged him.—
Liz Tracey,
JSTOR Daily,
21 Feb. 2025
Adjective
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When Obama met Trump for a ritual pre-Inauguration visit to the Oval Office, he was struck by how unschooled and incurious the President-elect was.—
Peter Slevin,
New Yorker,
4 May 2026
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Mata was also concerned about how the data failed to display how INA staff works with the lowest English proficiency students in the district — specifically those who are unschooled, and oftentimes refugees who have just entered the country.—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
28 Apr. 2026
Cite this Entry
“Functionally illiterate.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/functionally%20illiterate. Accessed 19 Jun. 2026.
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