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inaccurate

UK/ɪnˈæ.kjʊ.ɹət/US/ɪnˈæk.jə.ɹɪt/
adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,532 of 15,258leans written

Inaccurate means not exactly right. Inaccurate figures, wildly inaccurate, an inaccurate account.

It is a measured word — it says wrong without saying dishonest, which is why corrections and retractions reach for it. In measurement, accuracy is closeness to the true value and precision is repeatability, so a reading can be precise and inaccurate at once. Note that the Latin root means done with care, so inaccurate is literally careless.

Definitions of inaccurate

  1. 1adjectiveinaccurateNot exactly right.B2+

    “The map was inaccurate, and we ended up on the wrong side of the lake.”

    synonyms: wrong, incorrect

inaccurate is a quality of error.

Where it comes from

In- plus accurate, from Latin accuratus, done with care, from cura, care. Cure, curious and secure come from the same care.

  1. Latin

    accūrātus

  2. English

    accurate

  3. English, today

    inaccurate

From in- + accurate. See also unaccurate. accurate Borrowed from Latin accūrātus. Compare English cure.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Word Building

Practise this word

inaccurate in the wild

  • An error is an inaccurate or incorrect action, thought, or judgement.

    Error

  • Other forms of human-based bias emerge in data collection as well such as response bias, in which participants give inaccurate responses to a question.

    Bias (statistics)

  • One may have a poorly designed sample, an inaccurate measurement device, and typos in recording data simultaneously.

    Bias (statistics)

  • The film is universally considered historically inaccurate, but was a commercial success.

    The Return of Frank James

  • Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of identifying and correcting (or removing) corrupt, inaccurate, or irrelevant records from a dataset, table, or database.

    Data cleansing

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the accūrātus family

accurateaccurately

inaccurate — used about once every 6,499 pages · #10,532 · point at the bar for the others