Meaning & use
literacy rate
Last updated
Meaning
nouncountable
The percentage of people in a population, often those over a set age, who are able to read and write.
Grammar: Countable: the country's literacy rate; two literacy rates compared.
Patterns
- a literacy rate of something
- raise the literacy rate
The country's literacy rate has risen to 95 percent as more children attend school.
The literacy rate among young women has improved sharply in the past decade.
A low literacy rate makes it harder for a country to develop its economy.
Word forms
| plural | literacy rates |
|---|
Common combinations
- high literacy rate
- Finland has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
- adult literacy rate
- The adult literacy rate is measured for people over fifteen.
- raise the literacy rate
- The program aims to raise the literacy rate in rural areas.
- youth literacy rate
- The youth literacy rate is now close to universal.
- national literacy rate
- The national literacy rate hides big differences between regions.
- literacy rate among women
- The literacy rate among women has doubled in twenty years.
Synonyms and how they differ
- literacy level
- Literacy level can describe how well one person reads, while literacy rate is a statistic about a whole group.
- rate of literacy
- Rate of literacy means the same but is wordier and used in more formal reports.
- adult literacy
- Adult literacy refers to reading ability in adults generally, and need not be a precise percentage.
Opposites
Word family
- literate adjective
- able to read and write
- illiterate adjective
- unable to read or write
- literacy noun
- the ability to read and write
- illiteracy noun
- the inability to read and write
- numeracy noun
- the ability to work with numbers
Commonly confused: literacy rate or literature?
literacy rate vs literature
Literature means written works such as novels and poems, while literacy is the ability to read and write.
Practice
The country's ___ has risen to 95 percent as more children attend school.
Choose one answer.
A literacy rate measures how many people can read and write, which school attendance raises. A birth rate, interest rate and exchange rate measure unrelated things.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “literacy rate”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.