How to Use textual in a Sentence

textual

adjective
  • The fight over this land has been very textual since Day One.
    Amir Sommer, Twin Cities, 11 Jan. 2024
  • This new knowledge calls for a new kind of close textual reading.
    Nathaniel Rich, Harper's magazine, 10 May 2019
  • Most fake news now is textual, with some photo hacking thrown in.
    Antonio García Martínez, WIRED, 26 Mar. 2018
  • The most direct route to textual salvation is to tell him to knock it off.
    Anna Pulley, Chicago Tribune, 29 Nov. 2022
  • This is not a movie, after all, that stands up to much textual analysis.
    Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 May 2017
  • But names feel more significant now that so much of modern life is textual.
    Julie Beck, The Atlantic, 15 May 2017
  • Best to relieve yourself of textual worries and bask in the fraught lyricism.
    Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 2 Feb. 2024
  • Field notes, Journal, hash marks, lists, charts—a textual ecosystem.
    Literary Hub, 17 Dec. 2025
  • Blue Lips is stocked with samples that feel both musical and textual.
    Mosi Reeves, Rolling Stone, 1 Mar. 2024
  • There is a notable amount of talk in the book about metaphors; so much so that trips start to feel like textual events as much as physical ones.
    John Williams, New York Times, 14 May 2018
  • That being said, there's a certain textual playfulness from the book.
    EW.com, 17 Nov. 2023
  • At least as a textual matter, then, we might be inclined to endorse the six propositions.
    Cass Sunstein, Big Think, 5 Mar. 2026
  • The ideas seem to flow from her unconscious, not from some contrived post-textual analysis.
    Minju Pak, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2017
  • The back of each card contains textual references to the blessing in question.
    John Kelly, Washington Post, 19 Sep. 2017
  • The fault lies less with the performers than with the revival’s hesitant approach to textual changes.
    Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 3 Aug. 2024
  • If that list of current officers is not exhaustive, there is no textual limit.
    Jason Lee Steorts, National Review, 15 May 2021
  • The film starts off as a straight homage to Herrington’s film peppered with one too many meta textual references.
    Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Mar. 2024
  • Some perform textual analyses of billions of words; others assess what people have searched for.
    Chad De Guzman, Time, 18 Nov. 2025
  • And space like a reading room brings scholars together to think and act with each other and with our textual histories.
    Aarian Marshall, Quartz, 20 Apr. 2021
  • Such people can even sell their textual wares in an online market called PromptBase.
    Matthew Hutson, WSJ, 25 Sep. 2022
  • On the bodice of the dress, an ornate design created a textual addition to the fabric.
    Julia Teti, WWD, 27 June 2024
  • The essay traces textual appearances of the animal through time.
    Wyatt Mason, Harper's Magazine, 26 Apr. 2024
  • But other courts are unwilling, including due to a lack of textual support in the law to authorize such an act.
    Michael McCann, Sportico.com, 15 June 2024
  • People who couldn’t travel all the way to Egypt would no longer have to imagine the scene from sketches and textual descriptions.
    Jimmy Maher, Ars Technica, 15 Mar. 2020
  • But, for the most part, the book doesn’t provide much in the way of textual explanation, and instead forces a close read of the images themselves.
    Sukjong Hong, Curbed, 21 Feb. 2025
  • The third part is the physical part of the show, which maniupulates the body as the foundational textual source.
    Kt Hawbaker, chicagotribune.com, 27 May 2018
  • That survival is embedded in the textual records of all colonial leaders and settlements.
    Sophia Nguyen, Washington Post, 16 June 2023
  • The groundwork is a light pencil sketch of the area’s streets and buildings, which Fassler has overlaid with dense textual commentaries.
    Mara Hoberman, Artforum, 1 Feb. 2025
  • To parse writing, AI models sleuth through textual clues, such as word choices, to see their connections.
    Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, Scientific American, 21 Apr. 2023
  • The next significant breakthroughs will be spatial, not textual.
    Alexandre De Vigan, Forbes.com, 9 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'textual.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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