nounsword-choice
Can excerpt and excerption replace each other in a particular sentence without changing its meaning? For example, given these two sentences:
- He presented excerpts from William James' philosophical writings.
- He presented excerptions from William James' philosophical writings.
Do both these nouns give the same meaning or change the sense in any way? Or is either of these two sentences wrong?
The Wikipedia article explains the difference in the best way possible:
In the fields of science, engineering, industry and statistics, the accuracy of a measurement system is the degree of closeness of measurements of a quantity to that quantity's actual (true) value. The precision of a measurement system, also called reproducibility or repeatability, is the degree to which repeated measurements under unchanged conditions show the same results. Although the two words can be synonymous in colloquial use, they are deliberately contrasted in the context of the scientific method.
High accuracy, but low precision:
High precision, but low accuracy:
It does change the meaning to swap them around. In the KJV OT:
Also, in terms of articles:
Best Answer
According to the OED, excerption refers to the act of taking an excerpt, so it's kind of a "meta" word. Sentence 2 above would be strange in that context. The use of excerption to mean an extract or an excerpt is archaic.