impute
verbUK /ɪmˈpjuːt/ · CA, US /ɪmˈpjut/
Etymology Borrowed from Middle French imputer, from Latin imputō (“to bring into the reckoning, charge, impute”).
1
To attribute or ascribe (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source.
- The teacher imputed the student's failure to his nervousness.
- 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.1751, Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, lines 37–40:
3 more examples
- 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.1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter XXXIV, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 141:
- He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy.1856 February, Thomas Babington Macaulay, “"Oliver Goldsmith"”, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th edition, volume and page numbers unknown:
- We ascribe or impute motives to others and avow them or confess to them in ourselves.1956–1960, Richard Stanley Peters, “2: Motives and Motivation”, in The Concept of Motivation, Routledge & Kegan Paul (second edition, 1960), page 29:
- 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.2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin (2010), page 607:
3
To take into account.
- 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.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, volume 6, page 328:
4
To attribute or credit to.
- People impute great cleverness to cats.
- In any case, the practices imputed to Shakespeare as an emergent dramatist were not in the least exceptional.2014, Janet Clare, Shakespeare's Stage Traffic, page 11:
5
Mathematics, Sciences, Statistics To replace missing data with substituted values.
- 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.2010, Mamdouh Refaat, Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 184:
- remove observed values and impute2012, Stef van Buuren, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data, page 263:
- Derived terms
- imputability, imputable, imputableness, imputably, imputation, imputative, imputed, misimpute