-
- To save this word, you'll need to log in.
automatic writing
noun
: writing produced without conscious intention as if of telepathic or spiritualistic origin
Examples of automatic writing in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
So the ideas came about from automatic writing, some of the current events, and also an incredible woman named Lhasa de Sela.
—Kory Grow, Rolling Stone, 20 Sep. 2024
What began five decades ago as a few folders of slides and fliers has grown into an apartment-filling archive encompassing color theory, UFOs, automatic writing and more.
—Julia Halperin, New York Times, 16 May 2024
His ideal seemed to be art with a minimum of conscious calculation, in the spirit of Dadaist automatic writing or the wriggly abstractions of Pierre Alechinsky.
—Jackson Arn, The New Yorker, 4 Mar. 2024
People would gather, drink, converse, listen to readings and try out things like automatic writing.
—Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2020
Starting with language itself, poetry and prose, a kind of free association led to automatic writing, then drawing, which led the surrealists to devise a collaborative game known as the Exquisite Corpse around 1925.
—John Zotos, Dallas News, 11 Aug. 2020
His work — rueful, cerebral, gloriously smutty — includes trance poetry and automatic writing.
—Parul Sehgal, New York Times, 5 May 2020
Dictionary Stories,’’ perched perilously somewhere between lexicography, automatic writing and flash fiction.
—Paul Wilner, San Francisco Chronicle, 26 Apr. 2018
Interested in philosophy and spiritualism, af Klint was part of de Fem (The Five), a group of women artists who conducted seances and experimented with automatic drawings long before Surrealists began their automatic writing projects.
—Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, 13 Oct. 2018
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'automatic writing.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
First Known Use
1855, in the meaning defined above
Time Traveler
The first known use of automatic writing was
in 1855
Dictionary Entries Near automatic writing
Cite this Entry
“Automatic writing.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/automatic%20writing. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
More from Merriam-Webster on automatic writing
Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about automatic writing
Love words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
Share