truth
English
Alternative forms
- trewth (obsolete)
- Truth (sometimes when referring to religious truth)
Etymology
From Middle English truthe, trewthe, treowthe, from Old English trēowþ, trīewþ (“truth, veracity, faith, fidelity, loyalty, honour, pledge, covenant”), from Proto-Germanic *triwwiþō (“promise, covenant, contract”), from Proto-Indo-European *drū- (“tree”), from Proto-Indo-European *deru- (“firm, solid”), equivalent to true + -th. Cognate with Norwegian trygd (“trustworthiness, security, insurance”), Icelandic tryggð (“loyalty, fidelity”).
Pronunciation
- enPR: trōōth, IPA(key): /tɹuːθ/
Audio (US) (file) - Rhymes: -uːθ
Noun
truth (usually uncountable, plural truths)
- True facts, genuine depiction or statements of reality.
- The truth is that our leaders knew a lot more than they were letting on.
- 1835, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Henry Nelson Coleridge, quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, volume II, →ISBN, page 19:
- The truth depends on, or is only arrived at by, a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material.
- 2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892, archived from the original on 4 November 2018:
- The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.
- Conformity to fact or reality; correctness, accuracy.
- There was some truth in his statement that he had no other choice.
- 2012 January 1, Robert M. Pringle, “How to Be Manipulative”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 1, page 31:
- As in much of biology, the most satisfying truths in ecology derive from manipulative experimentation. Tinker with nature and quantify how it responds.
- The state or quality of being true to someone or something.
- Truth to one's own feelings is all-important in life.
- (archaic) Faithfulness, fidelity.
- (Can we date this quote?) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Alas! they had been friends in youth, / But whispering tongues can poison truth.
- (Can we date this quote?) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- (obsolete) A pledge of loyalty or faith.
- Conformity to rule; exactness; close correspondence with an example, mood, model, etc.
- (Can we date this quote?) John Mortimer
- Ploughs, to go true, depend much on the truth of the ironwork.
- 1840, Joseph Whitworth, "A Paper on Plane Metallic Surfaces or True Planes":
- The process of grinding is, in fact, regarded as indispensable wherever truth is required, yet that of scraping is calculated to produce a higher degree of truth than has ever been attained by grinding.
- (Can we date this quote?) John Mortimer
- That which is real, in a deeper sense; spiritual or ‘genuine’ reality.
- The truth is what is.
- Alcoholism and redemption led me finally to truth.
- 1820, John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
- Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- (countable) Something acknowledged to be true; a true statement or axiom.
- Hunger and jealousy are just eternal truths of human existence.
- 1813, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, OCLC 38659585, OL 6087610M:
- It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
- (physics, dated) Topness. (See also truth quark.)
Synonyms
- See Thesaurus:truth
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
state or quality of being true to someone or something
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pledge of loyalty or faith
conformity to fact or reality
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true facts
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that which is real
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something acknowledged to be true
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
Translations to be checked
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Verb
truth (third-person singular simple present truths, present participle truthing, simple past and past participle truthed)
- (obsolete, transitive) To assert as true; to declare; to speak truthfully.
- c. 1636 John Ford, The Fancies Chaste and Noble
- Had they [the ancients] dreamt this, they would have truthed it heaven.
- c. 1636 John Ford, The Fancies Chaste and Noble
- To make exact; to correct for inaccuracy.
- 1974, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment, page 226:
- A concentrated region of the agricultural test area was intensively ground truthed, not only to identify the crop types, but equally important, also to begin to determine the parameters controlling the radar energy reflected from a crop type at a particular stage of growth.
- 1990, Advanced Infrared Technology - Part 2, page cxxvi:
- As is shown in this table, APG images in the validation subset were only truthed with box models, and the 29P images in this subset were never truthed at all.
- 2003, Advances in Pattern Recognition ICAPR2003, →ISBN, page 67:
- This database, which consisists of nearly 180,000 characters, was manually truthed.
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- (nonstandard, intransitive) To tell the truth.
- 1966, Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'"
- You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin'
- 1966, Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'"
References
- truth at OneLook Dictionary Search
- truth in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
Anagrams
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