Inerrant
adj.capable, thoughtfulformal
What it means
Free from error or incapable of being wrong.
Reach for it when using a specialist absolute term for a doctrine, text, or authority explicitly claimed to contain no error
The course compared traditions that treat the text as inerrant with those that do not.
Choose between these
5- everyday
evidence supports correctness without claiming perfection
not when Accurate can allow minor uncertainty and is safer for ordinary reporting.
- professional
authoritative
a source merits reliance within its field
not when Authority can be mistaken and does not entail inerrancy.
- professional
a bounded check found no errors in a defined artifact
not when Error-free is credible only within the scope and method of the check.
- formal
a person or authority is claimed to be incapable of error
not when Infallible concerns the capacity to err, while inerrant often describes a text's state.
- literary
repeated judgment appears never to miss
not when Unerring is often rhetorical and may hide the unobserved failures.
Said against
3- errant
- fallible
- mistaken
It naturally appears in
3- inerrant text
The scholar did not assume an inerrant text when comparing the variants.
- consider inerrant
Some readers consider the rule inerrant, while the committee treats it as revisable.
- claim to be inerrant
No forecasting model should claim to be inerrant.
Where this comes from
Inerrant is an absolute and often doctrinal claim. It should not be applied to empirical systems or people without naming the belief context.
- Merriam-Webster, adjective sense 1: free from error opens in a new tab · retrieved 2026-07-26
The definition and the example on this page are written here. The dictionaries above ground which meaning is being described, not the wording.