exactitude
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From French exactitude, from exact, from Latin exactus, perfect passive participle of exigō (“demand, claim as due" or "measure by a standard, weigh, test”), from ex (“out”) + agō (“drive”).[1]
Pronunciation
[edit]- IPA(key): /ɪɡˈzæktɪt(j)uːd/
Audio (Southern England): (file)
Noun
[edit]exactitude (countable and uncountable, plural exactitudes)
- Attention to small details; accuracy.
- Synonym: exactness
- Antonym: inexactitude
- 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter XLIV, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
- [W]hen making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in veins, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision.
- 1896, Joseph Conrad, chapter IV, in An Outcast of the Islands, London: T. Fisher Unwin […], →OCLC, part IV, page 272:
- He paced stiffly, looking with extreme exactitude at Lingard's face; looking neither to the right nor to the left but at the face only, as if there was nothing in the world but those features familiar and dreaded; […]
- 1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Appendix. The Principles of Newspeak.”, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, page 280:
- In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning.
Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]attention to small details — see also accuracy
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References
[edit]- ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “exactitude”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
Further reading
[edit]- “exactitude”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
- “exactitude”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
French
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]exactitude f (plural exactitudes)
Descendants
[edit]- → English: exactitude
Further reading
[edit]- “exactitude”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
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- English uncountable nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- French terms suffixed with -itude
- French 4-syllable words
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- Rhymes:French/yd
- French terms with homophones
- French lemmas
- French nouns
- French countable nouns
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