¹verbatim

adverb ver·ba·tim \(ˌ)vər-ˈbā-təm\

Definition of VERBATIM

: in the exact words : word for word <quoted the speech verbatim>

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The New York Times reported that recent posts lambasting legislation against Wal-Mart came verbatim from the retailer's p.r. firm. —Sally B. Donnelly et al., Time, 20 Mar. 2006
Around his eleventh year he compiled a sort of commonplace book in which he transcribed passages from his reading. … But these entries aren't rendered verbatim: [Arthur] Rimbaud expands and contracts his sources, plays with lines, exhibiting a very early, very organic sort of literary criticism. —Wyatt Mason, Harper's, October 2002
“My own anxieties about mortality are tempered just slightly,” says [Ken] Burns (quoting, almost verbatim, his introduction to “Jazz's” companion coffee-table book), “by the notion that if we continue to try hard, we'll have a chance to hear Louis blow Gabriel out of the clouds.” —David Gates, Newsweek, 8 Jan. 2001
Some passages in the book are taken verbatim from the blog … —Publishers Weekly, 13 June 2005
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Middle English, from Medieval Latin, from Latin verbum word

First Known Use: 15th century

adjective ver·ba·tim \(ˌ)vər-ˈbā-təm\

: in exactly the same words

: being in or following the exact words : word-for-word <a verbatim report of the meeting>

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Was Coleridge's “Table Talk,” as recorded by his circle, his words or theirs—or a conflation of both? And what about Boswell, the most celebrated auditor of them all, who composed a masterpiece of English literature out of the supposedly verbatim speech of Samuel Johnson? Did Johnson begin his every declaration with an orotund “Sir?” —James Atlas, New York Times Magazine, 23 June 1991
Some readers may unfortunately be made mistrustful of the authors' findings by their attempts to enliven the book with unverifiable—if inconsequential—details about the settings of events and by occasionally presenting unrecorded conversations of four decades ago in the form of verbatim quotations. —Henry Ashby Turner, New York Times Book Review, 22 June 1986
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