veracidade

Forms

veracidade f (plural veracidades)^[1]

Etymology

Houaiss calls its origin doubtful and sets out three views.^[2] For Cunha, followed by Aurélio, Michaelis and Silva Bastos, it is borrowed from Medieval Latin veracitas (“truthfulness”).^[2][3][4][5] For Nascentes it was formed in Portuguese from Latin verax (“truthful”) with a linking -i- and the suffix -dade, as Porto Editora and the Academia's DLP also say.^[6][7][8] For Machado it is French véracité, a French word recorded once in 1458 and again from Descartes in 1644.^[2][9] Aulete gives the origin as obscure.^[10]

All three go back to the Latin adjective, which is formed from verus (“true”) with the suffix -ax.^[2][1][11] The Portuguese adjective veraz was taken from it directly, and is recorded later, in Bluteau's dictionary of 1721.^[12]

Earliest recorded meaning

Houaiss's first record is of 1692, with the sense “quality of what is true”.^[2] Bluteau (1712–1728) treats it as a virtue: the prudent measure of truth in what one tells of one's own or others' affairs in conversation, a mean between arrogance, which says more than there is, and dissimulation, which says less.^[13]

Semantic evolution

Feijó (1734) glosses it as “plain truth”, and Morais (1789) as the quality of being truthful, said of a person, a fact or an event.^[14][15] The modern dictionaries keep the two senses, the truth of a thing, a statement or a feeling, and a person's attachment to the truth.^[2][3][8] In French, Descartes's véracité divine named the attribute by which God can neither deceive nor be deceived.^[9]

Timeline

• 1692 – first record.^[2]
• 1712–1728 – Bluteau describes veracidade as a virtue of conversation.^[13]
• 1734 – Feijó glosses it as “plain truth”.^[14]
• 1789 – Morais defines it as the quality of being truthful.^[15]
• 1823 – the word in a private letter.^[16]
• 1860 – the word in a Bahian document.^[17]

Meanings

Noun

1. veracity, truthfulness: the quality of what is true or agrees with the truth; veridicidade: Ninguém pôs em causa a veracidade do relato.^[2][1][18]
2. A person's attachment to the truth; the habit of saying only what is true.^[2][3][4]

Related words

• veraz
• verdade
• verídico
• Latin verax
• French véracité

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Houaiss, Antônio; Villar, Mauro de Salles (2001), Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, p. s.v. veracidade
3. ^ a b c Ferreira, Aurélio Buarque de Holanda, Novo dicionário Aurélio da língua portuguesa, digital edition, p. s.v. veracidade
4. ^ a b Michaelis: Moderno Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, São Paulo: Melhoramentos (online as Michaelis Dicionário Brasileiro da Língua Portuguesa, https://michaelis.uol.com.br), p. s.v. veracidade
5. ^ Silva Bastos, José Timóteo da (1912), Diccionario etymologico, prosodico e orthographico da lingua portugueza, Lisboa: Parceria António Maria Pereira, p. s.v. veracidade
6. ^ Nascentes, Antenor (1966), Dicionário etimológico resumido, Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, p. s.v. veracidade
7. ^ Porto Editora (2013), Grande Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, Porto: Porto Editora, p. 9440
8. ^ a b Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, revised online edition (2023–) of the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea (2001), https://dicionario.acad-ciencias.pt, p. s.v. veracidade
9. ^ a b Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert, p. s.v. véracité
10. ^ Aulete, Francisco Júlio Caldas, Dicionário contemporâneo da língua portuguesa (1st ed. 1881), online as Aulete Digital, Rio de Janeiro: Lexikon, https://aulete.com.br, p. s.v. veracidade
11. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. s.v. uērax
12. ^ Houaiss, Antônio; Villar, Mauro de Salles (2001), Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, p. s.v. veraz
13. ^ a b Bluteau, Raphael (1712–1728), Vocabulario portuguez e latino, 8 vols. + 2 supplement vols., Coimbra / Lisboa (CLP transcription, Universidade de Aveiro), p. s.v. veracidade
14. ^ a b Feijó, João de Morais Madureira (1734), Orthographia, ou Arte de escrever, e pronunciar com acerto a lingua portugueza, Lisboa (CLP transcription, Universidade de Aveiro), p. s.v. veracidade
15. ^ a b Silva, António de Morais (1789), Diccionario da lingua portugueza composto pelo padre D. Rafael Bluteau, reformado, e accrescentado, 2 vols., Lisboa: Simão Thaddeo Ferreira, p. 2, 18
16. ^ CLUL (ed.) (2014), P.S. Post Scriptum: Arquivo Digital de Escrita Quotidiana em Portugal e Espanha na Época Moderna, Lisboa: Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, http://ps.clul.ul.pt, p. s.v. veracidade
17. ^ Carneiro, Zenaide de Oliveira Novais; Lacerda, Mariana Fagundes de Oliveira (orgs.), CE-DOHS: Corpus Eletrônico de Documentos Históricos do Sertão, Feira de Santana: UEFS, http://www5.uefs.br/cedohs, p. s.v. veracidade
18. ^ Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa, Lisboa: Priberam Informática, https://dicionario.priberam.org, p. s.v. veracidade