Literally vs Null - What's the difference?
literally | null |
(speech act) word for word; not figuratively; not as an idiom or metaphor
* {{quote-news
, year=2012
, date=May 24
, author=Nathan Rabin
, title=Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3
, work=The Onion AV Club
(degree, proscribed) used non-literally as an intensifier for figurative statements : virtually (often considered incorrect; see usage notes)
* 1827 , Sir Walter Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate
* 1993 , , Real Magic , page 193:
* 2009 , :
(colloquial) Used as a generic downtoner : just, merely.
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As an adverb literally
is (speech act) word for word; not figuratively; not as an idiom or metaphor.As a noun null is
zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.literally
English
Alternative forms
* litterally (obsolete)Adverb
(-)- When I saw on the news that there would be no school tomorrow because of the snowstorm, I literally jumped for joy, and hit my head on the ceiling fan.
citation, page= , passage=Sequels to fish-out-of-water comedies make progressively less sense the longer a series continues. By the time Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles rolled around in 2001, 15 years after the first Crocodile Dundee became a surprise blockbuster, the title character had been given an awfully long time to grow acclimated to those kooky Americans. Men In Black 3 finagles its way out of this predicament by literally resetting the clock with a time-travel premise that makes Will Smith both a contemporary intergalactic cop in the late 1960s and a stranger to Josh Brolin, who plays the younger version of Smith’s stone-faced future partner, Tommy Lee Jones.}}
- The house was literally electrified; and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius that he could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence could be carried.
- You literally become the ball in a tennis match, you become the report that you are working on
- - She took a giant shit on my face. Literally.
- - Literally?
- - Well, no, not literally . That's disgusting. What's wrong with you?
- You literally put it in the microwave for five minutes and it's done.
Usage notes
"Literally" is the opposite of "figuratively", so many authorities object to the use of literally'' as an intensifier for figurative statements. For example "you literally become the ball", by the primary sense, would mean actually transforming into a spherical object, but the speaker is using ''literally as an intensifier. However, this type of usage is common in informal speech ("she was literally in floods of tears") and has a history of use in written English going back to at least 1827.Quotations
* (English Citations of "literally")Synonyms
* (not metaphorically) actually, really * (as an intensifier) virtuallyAntonyms
* (not metaphorically) figuratively, metaphorically, virtuallynull
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.