What does dictum mean?
Dictum means An authoritative statement; a dogmatic saying; a maxim, an apothegm..
Looking up this word…
Checking saved dictionary data and trusted language sources. This will stop automatically if a source does not respond.
Checking saved dictionary data and trusted language sources. This will stop automatically if a source does not respond.
/ˈdɪk.təm/ · noun
An authoritative statement; a dogmatic saying; a maxim, an apothegm..
This should not surprise us who know that van Gogh wrote: 'To paint and to love women is incompatible'; van Gogh was right for himself, which does not mean that he was right for everybody, and I will not draw from his dictum the probably incorrect conclusion that 'To paint and to love literature is incompatible.'
[…]a dictum which he had heard an economics professor once propound[…]
1. The utmost in steam producing capacity permitted by weight and dimensions; in other words, capacity to boil water—H. A. Ivatt's old dictum.
But this is not the philosophical revolution of which I speak. What Warhol's dictum amounted to was that you cannot tell when something is a work of art just by looking at it, for there is no particular way that art has to look.
Use dictum when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Dictum means An authoritative statement; a dogmatic saying; a maxim, an apothegm..
Common synonyms include pronouncement, obiter dictum, say-so.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
This should not surprise us who know that van Gogh wrote: 'To paint and to love women is incompatible'; van Gogh was right for himself, which does not mean that he was right for everybody, and I will not draw from his dictum the probably incorrect conclusion that 'To paint and to love literature is incompatible.'
FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0
Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.