Veritable means genuinely deserving the name you are about to give it. A veritable feast, a veritable army of helpers.
The word exists to license an exaggeration. Calling something a veritable mountain of paperwork admits the metaphor and insists on it in the same breath, which is why it almost always sits in front of a striking noun. It is formal and slightly theatrical, and it never describes anything literal — nobody says a veritable table. Its root is Latin veritas, truth, which also gives English verify and verdict.
1adjectiveveritableTruly deserving the description given, used to strengthen a metaphor.
“The garden was a veritable jungle by August.”
Proto-Indo-European
*weh₁-
Latin
veritabilis
Old French
veritable
Middle French
veritable
English, today
veritable
From verity + -able, from Middle French veritable, from Old French veritable, from Latin veritabilis.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire
First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word