Learn English – Should I say “more exact”/”more precise”

differencesusageword-usage

My understanding with the words exact, precise and accurate is that they are absolute. Meaning, there cannot be less accurate or more accurate. Is my understanding correct? If it's exactly 1 meter, then there cannot be more exact than 1 meter. Also, are these words (exact, precise and accurate) exact synonyms? I have read their meanings in the dictionary and they are, well, the same.

I am writing a blog that has a title "Love and Lust". I want to point out that it is more accurate/precise to say that the title should be "Romantic Love and Lust", as there are three kinds of love.

Best Answer

  1. You can have more and less accurate. It is the closeness to a target. Rifle shooters are awarded points in order of accuracy to the bulls'eye. The accuracy of the description from the eyewitness with bad eyesight, was very low.

  2. Precise relates to very fine detail - how carefully measured (or described) something is. You can be precise and not accurate. I have two watches. One with only hours minutes, but the other gives seconds also, so more precise measuring of time. ( I wish it was digital and even more precise to 0.1 seconds measurement). Anyway, I missed my 9:00am train every morning for a week using the more precise watch! How ? Every day I arrived at the train platform very precisely at 8:54:49 (+/- 1 second) - repeatedly - I am very measured! However, I kept missing the train! Why? Well because the time on the watch had not been set accurately - it was 15 minutes out from the true time - inaccurate. I was measuring precisely ( to the nearest second) but was not at all accurate in my time measurement. Precise but not accurate. A person can give a precise (detailed ) description of a location (bench, path, fence, gate , tree, rock, etc) - but be totally inaccurate to the actual location (on a map say, or street name in a town) of an event.

  3. "I am writing a blog that has a title "Love and Lust". I want to point out that it is more accurate/precise to say that the title should be "Romantic Love and Lust", as there are three kinds of love."

Perhaps the words you want are less ambiguous (more defined, more clear):

I want to point out that it is less ambiguous to say that the title should be "Romantic Love and Lust", as there are three kinds of love.

Otherwise I think I would go with both - precise (more detailed description) and accurate :

I want to point out that it is more precise, and accurate, to say that the title should be "Romantic Love and Lust", as there are three kinds of love.

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