textual
adjective
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Before the invention of the printing press, books were produced by hand. When the text of a book is copied this way, textual errors can creep in, and a text that's been copied again and again can contain many such errors. By comparing different copies of a work, textual critics try to figure out where the copyists went wrong and restore the text to its original form so that modern readers can again enjoy the correct versions of ancient texts. When a class performs textual analysis of a poem, however, they are looking closely at its individual words and phrases in an effort to determine the poem's meanings.
Examples of textual in a Sentence
Michael McCann, Sportico.com, 27 Jan. 2026
There’s a risk of getting gummed up in the noticing stage, too taken with the complicated pleasures of textual closeness to move on to the necessary next analytical steps.
—Katie Kadue, Harpers Magazine, 27 Jan. 2026
And fittingly for a final novel, Vilhelm’s Room also delves into writing and its processes, a satisfying meta-textual move.
—Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 6 Jan. 2026
Multimodal LLMs, trained with voluminous multimedia data in addition to textual data, have introduced some basics of spatial awareness, and today’s AI can analyze pictures, answer questions about them, and generate hyperrealistic images and short videos.
—Fei-Fei Li, Time, 11 Dec. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Textual.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/textual. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.
Copy CitationKids Definition
textual
adjective
