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I hope you can also find some humor in expressions where the use of literallyto mean ‘figuratively’ creates (figuratively) mind-blowing images (e.g., the Jan. And all of us would do well to avoid sentences where the use of literallyis truly ambiguous. My advice would be if you are someone who does not like literallyused to mean ‘figuratively,’ feel free not to use it that way in your own speech or writing. Or, “Her words literally blew me away,” and I think, “It’s amazing you are still here to talk to me.” I will hear someone say, “I was literally climbing the walls,” and I have this image of them climbing the walls, which makes me giggle. Now if you interpret literally literallyin some of the ways people use it, you can get some amazing images. Over time, that’s how the word literallycame to mean ‘figuratively.’ You can imagine someone else hearing that statement and thinking that it is emphatic: He didn’t actually fall at her feet, but he figuratively fell at her feet. Imagine someone says, “He literally fell at her feet,” to emphasize that that’s what he actually did. So how did literallycome to mean ‘figuratively’?Įven when people are using literallyin the literal sense, it can be used for emphasis.

In other words, this usage is nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionaryhas included this second, informal meaning of literallyfor over a hundred years, and experts now date the use of literally to mean ‘figuratively’ back into the 18 th century. The first part defines literallyas “in a literal manner or sense exactly.” The second part notes that in informal use, sometimes literallyis used to indicate that something is not being said in a literal manner: It is emphatic and means something like ‘figuratively’ or ‘metaphorically.’ What the kerfuffle shows, though, is how much people care about the way otherpeople use the word literally. Linguists were quick to note that complaints about this use of literallyare nothing new. In August of 2013 there was a kerfuffle on the Internet over the use of the word literallyto mean ‘figuratively.’ It was sparked by a Reddit user who noticed the way Google defines the word and wrote, “We finally killed English.”