Word of the Day

: December 27, 2016

veridical

adjective vuh-RID-ih-kul

What It Means

1 : truthful, veracious

2 : not illusory : genuine

veridical in Context

"All psychotherapies are based on the fact that memory is not veridical, that unconscious desires and fantasies exert their force on us all.…" — Henry Kaminer, The Weekly Standard, 31 July 2000

"In this book, therefore, 'perception' is used to cover all sensory experience, whether veridical or not." — Jeffrey Gray, Consciousness: Creeping Up on the Hard Problem, 2004

Did You Know?

We'll tell only the truth here: veridical comes from the Latin word veridicus, which itself is from two other Latin words: verus, meaning "true," and dicere, meaning "to say." Verus is an ancestor of several English words, among them verity, verify, and very (which originally meant "true"). The word verdict is related to veridical on both sides of the family: it also traces back to verus and dicere. Veridical itself is the least common of the verus words. You're most likely to encounter it in contexts dealing with psychology and philosophy.