impute

Borrowed from Middle French imputer, from Latin imputō (“to bring into the reckoning, charge, impute”).

• IPA^(key): /ɪmˈpjuːt/

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• Rhymes: -uːt

impute (third-person singular simple present imputes, present participle imputing, simple past and past participle imputed)

1. (transitive) To attribute or ascribe (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source.

   Synonyms: attribute, insinuate, charge, imply

   The teacher imputed the student's failure to his nervousness.

   • 1751, Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, lines 37–40:

     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.

   • 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:

     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.

   • 1856 February, Thomas Babington Macaulay, “"Oliver Goldsmith"”, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th edition, volume and page numbers unknown:

     He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy.

   • 1956–1960, Richard Stanley Peters, “2: Motives and Motivation”, in The Concept of Motivation, Routledge & Kegan Paul (second edition, 1960), page 29:

     We ascribe or impute motives to others and avow them or confess to them in ourselves.

2. (transitive, theology) To ascribe (sin or righteousness) to someone by substitution.
   • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin (2010), page 607:

     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.

3. (transitive) To take into account.

   Synonyms: consider, regard, reckon

   • 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:

     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.

4. (transitive) To attribute or credit to.

   Synonyms: attribute, ascribe, assign

   People impute great cleverness to cats.

   • 2014, Janet Clare, Shakespeare's Stage Traffic, page 11:

     In any case, the practices imputed to Shakespeare as an emergent dramatist were not in the least exceptional.

5. (transitive, statistics) To replace missing data with substituted values.
   • 2010, Mamdouh Refaat, Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 184:

     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.

   • 2012, Stef van Buuren, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data, page 263:

     remove observed values and impute

• “impute”, in The Century Dictionary , New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “impute”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• uptime

impute

1. inflection of imputer:
   1. first/third-person singular present indicative/subjunctive
   2. second-person singular imperative

impute

1. inflection of imputar:
   1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
   2. third-person singular imperative

• IPA^(key):

impute

1. third-person singular/plural present subjunctive of imputa

impute

1. inflection of imputar:
   1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
   2. third-person singular imperative