impute
See also: imputé
English
WOTD – 30 March 2007
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French imputer, from Latin imputō (“to bring into the reckoning, charge, impute”).
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ɪmˈpjuːt/
Audio (US) (file) - Rhymes: -uːt
Verb
impute (third-person singular simple present imputes, present participle imputing, simple past and past participle imputed)
- (transitive) To attribute or ascribe (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source.
- Synonyms: attribute, insinuate, charge, imply
- The teacher imputed the student's failure to his nervousness.
- 1751, Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, lines 37–40:
- Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, / If mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, / Where thro’ the long-drawn isle and fretted vault, / The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
- 1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter XXXIV, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], OCLC 1000392275, page 141:
- I impute my improvement more to the kind attentions of Lord Allerton, who is my companion still, and will not, I think, leave me, than to the sea air.
- 1856 February, Thomas Babington Macaulay, “"Oliver Goldsmith"”, in Encyclopædia Britannica, eighth edition, volume and page numbers unknown:
- He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy.
- 1956–1960, Richard Stanley Peters, “2: Motives and Motivation”, in The Concept of Motivation, Routledge & Kegan Paul (second edition, 1960), page 29:
- We ascribe or impute motives to others and avow them or confess to them in ourselves.
- (transitive, theology) To ascribe (sin or righteousness) to someone by substitution.
- 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin (2010), page 607:
- To use the technical language of theologians, God through his grace "imputes" the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this "imputation" would not be "made" righteous at all.
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- (transitive) To take into account.
- Synonyms: consider, regard, reckon
- 1788, Edward Gibbon, “Chapter 64: A.D. 1355–1391: The Emperor John Palæologus; Discord of the Greeks”, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 6, page 328:
- They ſerved with honour in the wars of Bajazet; but a plan of fortifying Conſtantinople excited his jealouſy: he threatened their lives; the new works were inſtantly demoliſhed; and we ſhall beſtow a praiſe, perhaps above the merit of Palæologus, if we impute this laſt humiliation as the cauſe of his death.
- (transitive) To attribute or credit to.
- Synonyms: attribute, ascribe, assign
- People impute great cleverness to cats.
- 2014, Janet Clare, Shakespeare's Stage Traffic, page 11:
- In any case, the practices imputed to Shakespeare as an emergent dramatist were not in the least exceptional.
- (transitive, statistics) To replace missing data with substituted values.
- 2010, Mamdouh Refaat, Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 184:
- We will use a logistic regression model to impute values of nominal and ordinal variables and a linear regression model to impute values of continuous variables.
- 2012, Stef van Buuren, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data, page 263:
- remove observed values and impute
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Related terms
- imputability
- imputable
- imputableness
- imputably
- imputation
- imputed
Translations
to attribute to a cause or source
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to ascribe sin or righteousness
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to take account of; regard
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to attribute or credit to
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked
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References
- impute in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911
- impute in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
Anagrams
- uptime
French
Verb
impute
- inflection of imputer:
- first/third-person singular present indicative/subjunctive
- second-person singular imperative
Portuguese
Verb
impute
- inflection of imputar:
- first/third-person singular present subjunctive
- third-person singular imperative
Romanian
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): [imˈpute]
Verb
impute
- third-person singular/plural present subjunctive of imputa
Spanish
Verb
impute
- inflection of imputar:
- first/third-person singular present subjunctive
- third-person singular imperative