All 37 Uses of
precise
in
Middlemarch
- His very name carried an impressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise chronology of scholarship.†
Chpt 1
- He delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech, occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke's scrappy slovenliness.†
Chpt 1
- And he delivered this statement with as much careful precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be attended with results.†
Chpt 1
- Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe.†
Chpt 1
- It would be a great mistake to suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr. Casaubon's learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character.†
Chpt 1
- She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.†
Chpt 1
- Precisely.†
Chpt 2 *
- Rosamond, with the executant's instinct, had seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo.†
Chpt 2
- Mrs. Farebrother welcomed the guest with a lively formality and precision.†
Chpt 2
- That was precisely what Will wanted.†
Chpt 2
- Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would addict himself?†
Chpt 2
- "To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood," said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision.†
Chpt 3
- …the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion…†
Chpt 3
- "That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden," said the old lady, with an air of precision.†
Chpt 3
- If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.†
Chpt 3
- That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see how a process of maceration was going on, with undisturbed interest; and he wrote out his daily notes with as much precision as usual.†
Chpt 3
- But I beg you to observe that Mr. Casaubon's case is precisely of the kind in which the issue is most difficult to pronounce upon.†
Chpt 3
- Anxiety of any kind would be precisely the most unfavorable condition for him.†
Chpt 3
- If the right tack implied anything more precise than the rest of Mr. Brooke's speech, Mr. Casaubon silently hoped that it referred to some occupation at a great distance from Lowick.†
Chpt 4
- The next day, Mr. Casaubon received the following answer from Will Ladislaw:— "DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—I have given all due consideration to your letter of yesterday, but I am unable to take precisely your view of our mutual position.†
Chpt 4
- I could add no information to this beyond anatomical or medical details, which would leave expectation at precisely the same point.†
Chpt 4
- The trash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it gave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his own part of ignorant puffing.†
Chpt 5
- The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook.†
Chpt 5
- Lord Triton is precisely the man: full of plans for making the people happy in a soft-headed sort of way.†
Chpt 6
- If any one had asked him why he shrank in that way, I am not sure that he would at first have said anything fuller or more precise than "That Ladislaw!†
Chpt 6
- In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding rather that it was likely to be against the poor man, and that suspicion was the only wise attitude with regard to it.†
Chpt 6
- There was a severe precision in Mrs. Garth's utterance.†
Chpt 6
- "Precisely; you cannot conceive," said Mrs. Garth, cutting her words as neatly as possible.†
Chpt 6
- He had regarded Rosamond's cleverness as precisely of the receptive kind which became a woman.†
Chpt 6
- The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out of the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature, had come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women often adore their priest or "man-made" minister.†
Chpt 6
- He insisted too, and Mary, without fuss, began again in her neat fashion, with precisely the same words as before.†
Chpt 7
- Precisely; that is what she expressly desires.†
Chpt 7
- But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely the same way if he had not taken the money?†
Chpt 8
- It is often impossible to account for the precise moment of an attack—or rather, to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment.†
Chpt 8
- And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive.†
Chpt 8
- He had found Lydgate, for whom he had the sincerest respect, under circumstances which claimed his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the reason why, in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will to have avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate, was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible.†
Chpt 8
- Mrs. Garth pronounced that both were alike naughty, but that boys were undoubtedly stronger, could run faster, and throw with more precision to a greater distance.†
Chpt Fin.
Definition:
-
(precise as in: about noon; 12:03 to be precise) exact (accurate)editor's notes: In the fields of science, engineering, and statistics, precise and accurate are not properly used as synonyms the way they are in general usage.
If you throw darts at a dartboard and keep missing the bullseye, but hit in the same place on the dartboard each time, you would be described as precise, but not accurate.
If you seldom hit the bullseye, but tended to get close each time, you would be described as accurate, but not precise.
Finally, if you hit the bullseye each time, you would be considered both accurate and precise.