Text is written or printed words that communicate information or ideas. When you open a book, read a sign, or look at the words in this definition, you're reading text. The text of a story includes all its sentences and paragraphs, while the pictures are separate. A teacher might ask you to “look at the text on page 47,” meaning the actual words printed there.

Text can appear anywhere: in novels, textbooks, newspapers, websites, or even on cereal boxes. When something is described as text-heavy, it means there's a lot of reading involved and not many pictures. A text message gets its name because it's made of typed words rather than a voice recording.

People sometimes distinguish between different types of text. An informational text teaches you facts, like an encyclopedia entry. A literary text tells a story or expresses ideas artistically, like a poem or novel. Understanding how different texts work helps you become a better reader and writer, because a science report requires different skills than a mystery story, even though both are made of text.