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text

noun · verb

Simple meaning

A writing made up of multiple glyphs, characters, symbols or sentences.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

tehkst
US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈtɛkst

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. A writing consisting of multiple glyphs, characters, symbols or sentences.

  2. computing

    Data which can be interpreted as human-readable text.

  3. A book, tome or other set of writings.

  4. A passage from the Bible that is used as the subject of a sermon

    “The preacher chose a text from Psalms to introduce his sermon.”

  5. by extension

    Anything chosen as the subject of an argument, literary composition, etc.

  6. colloquial

    A brief electronic message sent between mobile phones.

verb

  1. transitive

    To send a text message to; i.e. to transmit text using the Short Message Service (SMS), or a similar service, between communications devices, particularly mobile phones.

  2. intransitive

    To send and receive text messages.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
A1 · Beginner
Frequency
Very Common
Typical Use
Everyday English

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: A writing consisting of multiple glyphs, characters, symbols or sentences.

Used this way, text is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Matter-of-fact
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use text

  • “There were more than a thousand words of text.”noun
  • “Pictures made the text easier to understand.”noun

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

text boxtext filesee textfull textoriginal textenglish textgreek textbiblical text

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Word family

Words built from the same root.

  • textualadjectiveDerived adjective

    Related to A writing consisting of multiple glyphs, characters, symbols or sentences.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • text editornounCompound term

    An editor who prepares text for publication.

  • text editionnounCompound term

    A book prepared for use in schools or colleges.

  • text filenounCompound term

    A computer file that contains text (and possibly formatting instructions) using seven-bit ASCII characters.

  • text-matchingnounCompound term

    A computer program that looks for text that matches a given text.

  • machine-readable textnounCompound term

    Electronic text that is stored as strings of characters and that can be displayed in a variety of formats.

  • religious textnounCompound term

    Writing that is venerated for the worship of a deity.

Related words

Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.

  • textual criticismnounRelated term

    Comparison of a particular text with related materials in order to establish authenticity.

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.