exactitude

From French exactitude, from Latin exactus, perfect passive participle of exigō (“demand, claim as due" or "measure by a standard, weigh, test”), from ex (“out”) + agō (“drive”).

exactitude (countable and uncountable, plural exactitudes)

1. Exactness, accuracy; attention to small details.
   • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 44,

     […] when 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, An Outcast of the Islands, Chapter 4,

     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, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak

     In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning.

• exactness

• inexactitude

• exact

• exactitude in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
• exactitude at OneLook Dictionary Search

• IPA^(key): /ɛɡ.zak.ti.tyd/

• Audio (France)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -yd
• Homophone: exactitudes

exactitude f (plural exactitudes)

1. Exactitude, accuracy

• “exactitude” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).