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

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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

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believed in an infallible Bible— Sweet

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no mathematician is infallible; he may make mistakes; but he must not hedge— Eddington

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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

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decision from the inerrable and requisite conditions of sense— Browne

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not an inerrable text—Gladstone

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but inerrant may imply not so much the incapacity for making mistakes or errors as the fact of their absence

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an inerrant account of the battle

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the Church was ubiquitous, omniscient, theoretically inerrant and omnicompetent— Coulton

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the inerrant literary sense which gave us the Prayer Book Collects— Sperry

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Unerring implies inerrancy, but it stresses reliability, sureness, exactness, or accuracy (as of aim or observation)

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a marksman of unerring aim

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an unerring eye for fleeting expression of the moral features of character— J. R. Lowell

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a man is infallible, whose words are always true; a rule is infallible, if it is unerring in all its possible applications— Newman

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a man's language is an unerring index of his nature— Binyon

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Analogous words: *certain, inevitable, necessary: impeccable, flawless, faultless

Antonyms: fallible

Contrasted words: questionable, dubious, *doubtful