- infallible
- infallible, inerrable, inerrant, unerring are comparable when they mean incapable, or manifesting incapability, of making mistakes or errors.Infallible occurs in this narrow sense chiefly in reference to something (as a person, institution, or book) that is accepted as the divinely inspired medium for the revelation of moral or spiritual truth{
the pope is held by Roman Catholics to be infallible only when he speaks ex cathedra and defines a doctrine or a rule of morals held by the church
}{believed in an infallible Bible— Sweet
}{no mathematician is infallible; he may make mistakes; but he must not hedge— Eddington
}Inerrable and inerrant are erudite synonyms of infallible and may be preferable to the latter when it is desired to avoid connotations associated with the notion of papal infallibility{decision from the inerrable and requisite conditions of sense— Browne
}{not an inerrable text—Gladstone
}but inerrant may imply not so much the incapacity for making mistakes or errors as the fact of their absence{an inerrant account of the battle
}{the Church was ubiquitous, omniscient, theoretically inerrant and omnicompetent— Coulton
}{the inerrant literary sense which gave us the Prayer Book Collects— Sperry
}Unerring implies inerrancy, but it stresses reliability, sureness, exactness, or accuracy (as of aim or observation){a marksman of unerring aim
}{an unerring eye for fleeting expression of the moral features of character— J. R. Lowell
}{a man is infallible, whose words are always true; a rule is infallible, if it is unerring in all its possible applications— Newman
}{a man's language is an unerring index of his nature— Binyon
}Analogous words: *certain, inevitable, necessary: impeccable, flawless, faultlessAntonyms: fallibleContrasted words: questionable, dubious, *doubtful
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.