truth

truth, veracity, verity, verisimilitude are comparable when they mean the quality or property of keeping close to the facts or to things as they are and avoiding such distortions as lies, fictions, or misrepresentations. Truth is a general term ranging in meaning from a transcendent idea to an indication of conformity with fact and of avoidance of error, misrepresentation, or falsehood

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the truths of religion are more like the truths of poetry than like the truths of science; that is, they are vision and insight, apprehended by the whole man, and not merely by the analyzing mind— Times Lit. Sup.

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truth as the opposite of error and of falsehood— Eliot

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Veracity usually implies rigid and unfailing adherence to, observance of, or respect for truth

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question an opponent's veracity

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his passion for veracity always kept him from taking any unfair rhetorical advantages of an opponent— Huxley

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I cannot, indeed, guarantee the absolute veracity of any of my apparently authentic law reports— Sutherland

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Verity typically designates the quality of a state or thing in being true or entirely in accordance with factual reality or with what should be so regarded; sometimes the word designates what is marked by lasting, ultimate, or transcendent value

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most primitive and national religions have also started out, naturally enough, with the assumption of their own verity and importance— Kroeber

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the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice— Faulkner

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Verisimilitude describes the quality of a representation that causes one to accept it as true

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to convey human nature in fiction requires the highest degree of verisimilitude; events that seem just like those of life as the reader's experience has led him to conceive of life must happen to people who seem just like human beings in a succession which seems just like the course of human affairs— E. K. Brown

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the mathematical picture ... so far as we know . . . depicts the phenomena of nature with complete verisimilitude— Jeans

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Analogous words: exactness, precision, correctness, Tightness (see corresponding adjectives at CORRECT): authenticity, genuineness, veritableness (see corresponding adjectives at AUTHENTIC)

Antonyms: untruth: lie, falsehood