When someone says a film “literally blew my mind,” they are not reporting a neurological event. They are using literally to add force to a figure of speech. That use is old, widely documented, and common enough in American English that corpus researchers now track it as a distinct pattern. Whether it will remain in place is a more open question. The evidence supports calling it established. It does not prove that it is permanent.
What the speaker is actually asserting
A literal statement is one a listener could check against the world. “The bridge literally collapsed into the river” makes a claim of that kind. “The ending literally blew my mind” does not. Nobody listening takes it as a report about the speaker’s brain, and the speaker does not expect them to. What the word does here is signal intensity, the way “really” or “absolutely” would.
The difficulty is that the same word can serve several functions, and a single sentence does not always reveal which one is in play. Linguist Katerina Kostadinova’s 2018 study of American English classifies uses into three groups, and the classification is the most useful tool a reader can take from the debate.
Three functions of literally
Kostadinova’s analysis, published by Cambridge University Press in English Today, separates occurrences into basic use, dual use, and nonliteral use. The examples below are illustrative sentences written for this article, not quotations from the study.
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| Category | What the word does | Illustrative example | Relative frequency in the 2018 sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic use | Asserts that the event or state literally happened as described | “The flood literally swallowed the car park.” | Second most common |
| Dual use | Can intensify and also signal that the literal reading is meant or is unusually extreme | “He literally ran out of the room when the phone rang.” | Most common |
| Nonliteral use | Intensifies a figurative or hyperbolic expression with no literal claim | “That concert literally blew my mind.” | Substantially less frequent than the other two |
The dual category matters most for the debate. In those cases, literally can both emphasize and make the literal reading salient, and the study says these functions can coexist in real usage. A listener hearing “he literally ran out of the room” may take it as exaggeration or as a plain report of rapid departure, and the word alone does not settle which.
Two cautions follow. First, the frequency ranking is a property of one coded sample, not a measurement of how often any given speaker says the word in a particular way. Second, the phrase “literally blew my mind” is a clear case of the nonliteral category only because its figurative meaning is so obvious. Context, not vocabulary, decides the category.
A usage with a long documented history
The non-literal use is not a recent product of social media. Kostadinova’s analysis draws on American corpus material covering occurrences from 1810 through 2012. Dennis Baron, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois, discusses earlier historical examples and how dictionaries have treated the sense in his 2010 OUPblog article. The use is therefore documented across two centuries of American writing and speech, although the frequency of its different functions has shifted with the kinds of text that are sampled.
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That history also explains why the objection is not new. Once a word acquires a figurative sense, people who value its original meaning tend to notice the clash first. Baron frames the process as one in which meaning change tends to start with speakers and move upward into standard usage. In his words: “Words change over time, and that change tends to be bottom up rather than top down.”
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What the 2018 corpus study found
Kostadinova compared guidance in 70 American usage guides published between 1847 and 2014 with corpus material from COHA (the Corpus of Historical American English) and COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English). She also interviewed 70 American English speakers in Los Angeles in 2014. The interviews were a convenience sample, so they show how some speakers talk and react, but they do not estimate how common any attitude is among American English speakers as a whole.
| Data source | Period covered | Occurrences in the analysed sample |
|---|---|---|
| All corpus occurrences examined | 1810–2012 | 20,297 overall |
| Manually disambiguated sample, COHA | 1810–1989 | 1,155 |
| Manually disambiguated sample, COCA | 1990–2012 | 2,904 |
| Total manually disambiguated sample | 1810–2012 | 4,059 |
These counts describe the study’s data. They say nothing about how many people use the word. The author also cautions that small apparent differences between the historical and contemporary corpora may come from differences in how the corpora are composed, so a reader should not read a trend into a gap of that size.
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Public debate often treats every emphatic literally as one phenomenon. Corpus coding separates several functions, and that separation changes the picture. Figures quoted elsewhere that most uses are hyperbolic depend on how the categories are drawn, so they cannot be compared directly with a study that codes dual uses separately.
Why usage guides and readers object
Kostadinova found that usage guides commonly express negative attitudes toward the non-literal and intensifying use of literally. Those judgments are prescriptive. They tell writers what to do. The corpus findings are descriptive. They tell readers what has been done. The two can diverge without either being wrong about its own question.
Dictionaries sit in between. Merriam-Webster’s current entry for literally is a useful reference, but a dictionary records a sense that speakers use. It does not decide whether that sense is appropriate in a given register. A popular usage explainer published by Dictionary.com in 2020 shows how often the debate is framed as a question of correctness, which is a different question from whether the usage is present.
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Whether the objection is reasonable depends on the setting. In a technical report, a legal document, or a medical handover, where exactness matters, a reader may need the literal sense and deserve to have it unambiguous. In casual conversation, the intensifier is rarely confusing, because the figurative expression makes the intended reading plain. The judgment is about fit, not about whether the word has a right to the sense.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the 2026 study adds
A newer study by Johannes Kreiselmeier, published on 24 September 2026 in Student Research in English Linguistics, analyses COCA and examines non-literal uses diachronically. Its abstract reports increasing absolute and relative frequencies of non-literal uses, with genre-specific variation and changing syntagmatic environments, meaning the words that tend to appear alongside the form. The accessible abstract does not give numerical figures, so no rate or percentage can be attached to that finding here. Readers who need one should consult the full paper.
The finding supports the claim that the non-literal use has become more visible in recent corpus material, but it does not show how much more common it is in everyday speech, or whether that trend holds across all genres.
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Can we say the use is “here to stay”?
The title makes a prediction, and the evidence supports only part of it. What is established is that the non-literal use has a documented history of more than a century in American English, appears in current corpus data, and is recorded in dictionaries as a sense speakers use. What is not established is whether it will grow, stabilise, or fade.
Baron offers a conditional view. He suggests that the use could decline if it creates ambiguity, or if intensifiers lose their force through overuse, as many emphatic words do over time. Both conditions are plausible, and neither is a forecast. The study records a current pattern. Its future depends on whether listeners keep finding the intensifying sense useful and whether the literal sense stays distinct enough to avoid confusion. A defensible reading is that the non-literal literally is firmly part of current English, while its future strength and distribution remain open.
For readers, the practical takeaway is to check the context. If a sentence could be misread, the literal sense can be made explicit with a different word or a clause. If the phrase is clearly a figure of speech, the emphasis is doing what the speaker intended.
Quick Recap
Sources and dates
- Katerina Kostadinova, 2018, English Today (Cambridge University Press): corpus classification, usage-guide analysis, and the interview sample.
- Johannes Kreiselmeier, 2026, Student Research in English Linguistics: corpus-based diachronic study; abstract reports qualitative trends only.
- Dennis Baron, 2010, OUPblog: historical examples and interpretive commentary on how usage changes.
- Merriam-Webster, entry for “literally”: current dictionary treatment of the word.
- Dictionary.com, 2020: a popular usage explainer reflecting public prescriptive framing.
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