Etimology
From Middle English trouthe, truthe, trewthe, treowthe, from Old English trēowþ, trīewþ (“truth, veracity, faith, fidelity, loyalty, honour, pledge, covenant”), from Proto-Germanic *triwwiþō (“promise, covenant, contract”), from Proto-Indo-European *drū- (“tree”), from Proto-Indo-European *deru- (“firm, solid”), equivalent to true + -th. Cognate with Norwegian trygd (“trustworthiness, security, insurance”), Icelandic tryggð (“loyalty, fidelity”).
noun
truth (usually uncountable, plural truths)
True facts, genuine depiction or statements of reality.
Conformity to fact or reality; correctness, accuracy.
The state or quality of being true to someone or something.
(archaic) Faithfulness, fidelity.
(obsolete) A pledge of loyalty or faith.
Conformity to rule; exactness; close correspondence with an example, mood, model, etc.
That which is real, in a deeper sense; spiritual or ‘genuine’ reality.
(countable) Something acknowledged to be true; a true statement or axiom.
(physics, dated) Topness; the property of a truth quark.
(games) In the game truth or dare, the choice to truthfully answer a question put forth.
Examples
The truth is that our leaders knew a lot more than they were letting on.
The truth depends on, or is only arrived at by, a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material.
The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.
There was some truth in his statement that he had no other choice.
As in much of biology, the most satisfying truths in ecology derive from manipulative experimentation. Tinker with nature and quantify how it responds.
Truth to one's own feelings is all-important in life.
Alas! they had been friends in youth; / But whispering tongues can poison truth; […]
Ploughs, […] to make them go true, […] depends much upon the truth of the ironwork.
The process of grinding is, in fact, regarded as indispensable wherever truth is required, yet that of scraping is calculated to produce a higher degree of truth than has ever been attained by grinding.
The truth is what is.
Alcoholism and redemption led me finally to truth.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Hunger and jealousy are just eternal truths of human existence.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
When asked truth or dare, he picked truth.
Related words
synonyms
See Thesaurus:truth
antonyms
falsehood, falsity, lie, nonsense, drivel, untruth, half-truth
related terms
true
untrue
verb
truth (third-person singular simple present truths, present participle truthing, simple past and past participle truthed)
(obsolete, transitive) To assert as true; to declare; to speak truthfully.
To make exact; to correct for inaccuracy.
(nonstandard, intransitive) To tell the truth.
Examples
Had they [the ancients] dreamt this, they would have truthed it heaven.
A concentrated region of the agricultural test area was intensively ground truthed, not only to identify the crop types, but equally important, also to begin to determine the parameters controlling the radar energy reflected from a crop type at a particular stage of growth.
As is shown in this table, APG images in the validation subset were only truthed with box models, and the 29P images in this subset were never truthed at all.
This database, which consisists of nearly 180,000 characters, was manually truthed.
You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin'