A translation or interpretation that adheres strictly to the exact words or text.
The literal translation of the poem lost much of its original beauty.
A person who interprets words in their most basic sense without considering any metaphorical or figurative meaning.
As a literal, he struggled to understand the humor in the joke.
Computing: a constant value such as a number, string, or boolean written directly in source code to represent itself rather than a reference or expression.
In Python, 42 is an integer literal and "hello" is a string literal.
(Printing, archaic) A typographical error, especially in a single letter.
Early printings of the novel contain several literals that were corrected in later editions.