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Definitions

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Pertaining to the threshold or entrance; hence, relating to the beginning or first stage; inceptive; inchoative.
  2. Specifically In psychophysics, pertaiuing to the stimulus limen or differential limen. See limen.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Pertaining to a threshold or entrance.
  2. adj. Relating to a beginning or first stage of a process; inceptive; inchoative; marginal; insignificant.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. of or pertaining to a limen, especially a sensory threshhold.
  2. adj. marginally perceptible.

Examples

  • “Havdalah marks what is called a "liminal moment," a boundary between the sacredness of the Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week.”

    The Huffington Post: Rabbi Lawrence Troster: The Spice-Box Of Earth: Remembering Where We Come From

  • “I was inspired to buy this by Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, which ranks it as a key exemplar of one of the four modes of fantasy story-telling, the 'liminal' in which the boundary with the fantastic is hazy and uncertain; other examples being Little, Big (which I bounced off) and the first two Gormenghast books (which I remember loving as a teenager).”

    June Books 17) Lud-In-The-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees

  • “So then, when a traumatic life event occurs, we sometimes experience an opening, a kind of liminal space in which we are receptive to the call of soul and spirit to create meaning.”

    Change as a Calling

  • “So right now, I am living in another kind of liminal space.”

    Random Thoughts on Life

  • “It's a fancy word that means "in between", in case you wondered -- kind of like "liminal".”

    Wednesday Stuff: Book Talk

  • “I'm so glad I started reading this anthology of "liminal", literary/genre works around the time I served on a panel on comics as interstitial art; for one thing, the panel was another project of the IAF, which is a great force for bringing literary attention to writers whose work might otherwise disappear, incorrectly, into the genre ghetto.”

    Honeymoon Hiatus, Pocket Reviews, and a Romantic Question

  • “Also: "liminal" or "liminality" but I suspect it just seems like I see it more frequently than I actually do.”

    Words

  • “She also used the intriguing word 'liminal' meaning barely perceptible subliminal - imperceptible liminal - barely perceptible supraliminal - in your face”

    Archive 2004-12-01

  • “Solid State maps spatial dynamics that the human listener might interpret to be some kind of liminal space between dancing, grooving, and completely falling apart.”

    PopMatters

  • “These religious liminals are distributed around each of the major religious traditions in roughly the same proportion, so that each tradition and each denomination seems to be surrounded by a penumbra of roughly 10 percent who are liminal members, neither entirely in nor entirely out.”

    Simon & Schuster: American Grace

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  • hernesheir A pair of nods to Victor Turner, my pals' Folklore advisor at Indiana University, would be "time-out-of-time" and "betwixt and between". Aug 5, 2009
  • catspringer Being neither altogether of one state or another. Between worlds. Mar 2, 2009
  • mollusque See also supraliminal. Dec 23, 2008
  • corylusavellana I was always told that Bronze Age burial mounds were often placed on the brows of hills, in a liminal location, giving a feeling of ancestral belonging to the residents of the valleys below. Dec 23, 2008
  • seanahan Interesting, knowing subliminal, but not this. Aug 1, 2008
  • houdini From Oxford Dictionary Online:


    a. gen. Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process. rare.

    b. spec. in Psychol. Of or pertaining to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold.’ Jul 31, 2008

‘liminal’ has been looked up 2864 times, loved by 21 people, added to 100 lists, commented on 6 times, and has a Scrabble score of 9.