impute

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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)

  1. (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, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Lady Anne Granard, volume 2, 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.
  2. (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.
  3. (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[1], 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.
  4. (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.
  5. (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

Translations

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Translations to be checked

References

Anagrams

French

Verb

impute

  1. inflection of imputer:
    1. first/third-person singular present indicative/subjunctive
    2. second-person singular imperative

Portuguese

Verb

impute

  1. first-person singular present subjunctive of imputar
  2. third-person singular present subjunctive of imputar
  3. first-person singular imperative of imputar
  4. third-person singular imperative of imputar

Romanian

Pronunciation

Verb

impute

  1. third-person singular/plural present subjunctive of imputa

Spanish

Verb

impute

  1. inflection of imputar:
    1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
    2. third-person singular imperative
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