Impute
verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 To attribute or ascribe (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source. transitive
"The teacher imputed the student's failure to his nervousness."
- 2 attribute or credit to wordnet
- 3 To ascribe (sin or righteousness) to someone by substitution. transitive
"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."
- 4 attribute (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source wordnet
- 5 To take into account. transitive
"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."
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- 6 To attribute or credit to. transitive
"People impute great cleverness to cats."
- 7 To replace missing data with substituted values. transitive
"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."
Example
More examples"It is perhaps interesting to note in this connection that Fermat's Principle was found objectionable by a contemporary optics expert because it seemed to impute knowledge to the working of Nature."
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French imputer, from Latin imputō (“to bring into the reckoning, charge, impute”).