non-literateadj.n.

1891 Internat. Jrnl. Ethics 1 512 Most of the non-literate pupils decidedly lack the sense of the grammatical relation of words in a sentence.

1932 Jrnl. Afr. Soc. 31 447 Philology has been singularly unsuccessful in the non-literate field where there are no documents.

1965 N.Y. Times 2 June 44/6 People that can read elected our President, House of Representatives, and Senate; there is no need to worry about what a non-literate group of voters might be able to accomplish.

1984 A. Kazin in Dissent (1998) Fall 104/1 My only real problem, as usual with students in literature, is that they are shrewd but non-literate, and I do get tired of mentioning exotic, out-of-the-way books like Hamlet and War and Peace.

2001 Los Angeles Times (Electronic ed.) 21 Aug. California students should be better readers. However, until all Californians—not just those who are educators by profession—accept the responsibility of making this happen, we will all pay the price of a nonliterate populace.

1948 M. J. Herskovits Man & his Works ii. v. 75 The..form, nonliterate, simply describes the fact that these people do not have written languages.

1958 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown Method in Social Anthropol. ii. iii. 155 The customs of ancient times might be better understood in the light of the resemblances they show to customs of non-literate peoples of later times.

1997 J. Diamond Guns, Germs & Steel 23 He was less interested in prehistory and in simpler, nonliterate societies.

1954 Social Forces 33 179/1 Jam music is not, as naive critics believe, totally unarranged and spontaneous; it is, rather, non-literate.

1981 Times 7 Feb. (Sat. Review) 9/7 We are most of us aware of the effects of music, dance and painting... It is also very noticeable in our efforts to come to grips with these ‘non-literate’ arts that words is what we believe we ought to put them into, if we can truly claim to have understood them.

1999 E. L. Doctorow in N.Y. Times 15 Mar. e1/5 Film has begun to affirm its essentially nonliterate nature and to make of its conventions an art form detached and self-contained, like painting.

1939 Man 39 100/2 Any tendency..to generalize from the Trobriand Islanders to non-literates as a whole.

1956 R. Redfield Peasant Society & Culture i. 6 Among these non-literates there was no history to learn.

1997 Amer. Naturalist 150 Suppl. 107 Group problem solving among nonliterates has not been descriptively well represented in ethnographic practice.