exactitude

plural exactitudes

1. countableuncountableAttention to small details; accuracy.

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

   1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Appendix. The Principles of Newspeak.”, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, page 280

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   [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.

   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

   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; […]

   1896, Joseph Conrad, chapter IV, in An Outcast of the Islands, London: T. Fisher Unwin […], →OCLC, part IV, page 272

   Synonyms: exactness · Antonyms: inexactitude