Liminal

Research

Of or relating to a threshold — a transitional state between two conditions; from the Latin limen; Arnold van Gennep applied it to rites of passage, and Victor Turner developed "liminality" into the ambiguous, in-between phase of ritual transition.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — liminal merriam-webster.com accessed 17 September 2026

Merriam-Webster records two senses: “of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold : barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response”, and “of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional”. From Latin limin-, limen, threshold. First recorded 1875. The first sense is the older psychophysical one and is still live in perception research; the second is the one social science borrowed, and confusing them in a literature review is easier than it sounds.

Merriam-Webster is cited here as the dictionary of record. Where a lexicon entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it — there is no other body with standing over what a word means. The reading of how the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own.

Related terms

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• Abstraction
• Academic Database
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• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.