exactitude

EnglishEdit

EtymologyEdit

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]

PronunciationEdit

IPA^(key): /ɪɡˈzæktɪt(j)uːd/
Audio (Swindon, England) (file)

NounEdit

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 57395299:
  [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 558805776, 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 690663892; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, page 280:
  In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning.