Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate.
- adjective Existing at the limen. Used of stimuli.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Specifically In psychophysics, pertaiuing to the stimulus limen or differential limen. See
limen . - Pertaining to the threshold or entrance; hence, relating to the beginning or first stage; inceptive; inchoative.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective of or pertaining to a limen, especially a sensory threshhold.
- adjective marginally perceptible.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Pertaining to a
threshold orentrance . - adjective Relating to a
beginning or first stage of a process;inceptive ;inchoative ;marginal ;insignificant .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Havdalah marks what is called a "liminal moment," a boundary between the sacredness of the Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week.
Rabbi Lawrence Troster: The Spice-Box Of Earth: Remembering Where We Come From Rabbi Lawrence Troster 2011
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Havdalah marks what is called a "liminal moment," a boundary between the sacredness of the Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week.
Rabbi Lawrence Troster: The Spice-Box Of Earth: Remembering Where We Come From Rabbi Lawrence Troster 2011
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Havdalah marks what is called a "liminal moment," a boundary between the sacredness of the Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week.
Rabbi Lawrence Troster: The Spice-Box Of Earth: Remembering Where We Come From Rabbi Lawrence Troster 2011
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Havdalah marks what is called a "liminal moment," a boundary between the sacredness of the Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week.
Rabbi Lawrence Troster: The Spice-Box Of Earth: Remembering Where We Come From Rabbi Lawrence Troster 2011
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Dragonflies tend to turn up at times in my life that I would describe as liminal -- threshold moments when you stand in the doorway between what your life was before and what it will be.
Cathleen Falsani: God Nods: Girl With the Dragonfly Tattoo 2010
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In anthropological terms, the transformative experience discussed above takes place during a phenomenon called the liminal state, that moment when a person has stepped across a psychological "threshold" out of the ordinary "world" of existence into a new "place" where they are open to experience, something undefined and unknown.
A Motley Vision 2008
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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 nwhyte 2010
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Power's photographs of contemporary Poland, taken over five years, often present what the writer Iain Sinclair has called "liminal" landscapes: in-between places often on the outskirts of cities, neglected and overlooked, neither here nor there.
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The nachtzehrer is a dead body kept in a kind of liminal life by supernatural forces or Satan.
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In our extended family, we have defined the "liminal" as the place where two very different states of being meet.
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However, in its modern incarnation liminal horror is more of an aesthetic than a symbol of passing between life and death. It tends to focus on "unsettling mundanity"—depictions of conventional liminal spaces like hallways and highways.
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Explore the eerie world of liminal horror, where familiar spaces become unsettling and psychological tension blurs reality, creating a lasting sense of dread.
What is Liminal Horror? The Horror HQ 2024
houdini commented on the word liminal
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.’
July 31, 2008
seanahan commented on the word liminal
Interesting, knowing subliminal, but not this.
August 1, 2008
corylusavellana commented on the word liminal
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.
December 23, 2008
mollusque commented on the word liminal
See also supraliminal.
December 23, 2008
catspringer commented on the word liminal
Being neither altogether of one state or another. Between worlds.
March 2, 2009
hernesheir commented on the word liminal
A pair of nods to Victor Turner, my pals' Folklore advisor at Indiana University, would be "time-out-of-time" and "betwixt and between".
August 6, 2009
hernesheir commented on the word liminal
Railroad telegraphers' shorthand for the phrase Supreme Court of the United States. --US Railway Association, Standard Cipher Code, 1906, p.317.
January 30, 2013