impute

verb

im·pute | \ im-ˈpyüt

imputed; imputing

Definition of impute

1 : to lay the responsibility or blame for (something) often falsely or unjustly The economic sins imputed to Tito had all been committed to a greater extent by the communist parties of neighbouring countries.— Hugh Seton-Watson

2 : to credit or ascribe (something) to a person or a cause : attribute our vices as well as our virtues have been imputed to bodily derangement— B. N. Cardozo

Other Words from impute Synonyms Choose the Right Synonym Put the Valuable Impute Into Your Vocabulary More Example Sentences Learn More About impute

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Other Words from impute

imputability \ im-ˌpyü-tə-ˈbi-lə-tē

\ noun

imputable \ im-ˈpyü-tə-bəl

\ adjective

Choose the Right Synonym for impute

ascribe, attribute, assign, impute, credit mean to lay something to the account of a person or thing. ascribe suggests an inferring or conjecturing of cause, quality, authorship. forged paintings formerly ascribed to masters attribute suggests less tentativeness than ascribe, less definiteness than assign. attributed to Rembrandt but possibly done by an associate assign implies ascribing with certainty or after deliberation. assigned the bones to the Cretaceous period impute suggests ascribing something that brings discredit by way of accusation or blame. tried to impute sinister motives to my actions credit implies ascribing a thing or especially an action to a person or other thing as its agent, source, or explanation. credited his teammates for his success

Put the Valuable Impute Into Your Vocabulary

Impute is a somewhat formal word that is used to suggest that someone or something has done or is guilty of something. It is similar in meaning to such words as ascribe and attribute, though it is more likely to suggest an association with something that brings discredit. When we impute something, we typically impute it to someone or something. You may also encounter the related noun imputation, which appears in such contexts as "I deny all your imputations of blame." Another sense of impute means "to calculate as a value or cost (as for taxation)," as in "impute a benefit from the use of the car."

Examples of impute in a Sentence

people often impute his silence to unfriendliness and not to the shyness it really represents

Recent Examples on the Web Significantly, the court refused to impute to those five tokens the core features of the Bix token and, therefore, all of the claims related to those five tokens were dismissed. — Andrea Tinianow, Forbes, 7 May 2021 Once those videoconference recordings are handed over, whoever combs through them will have a great opportunity to look for comments that sound bad, admissions, and statements that might be used to impute bad motivations. — Joshua Stein, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2021 If Trump voters are more likely to hang up on pollsters, then how should a forecast impute the preferences of non-respondents? — Aditya Kotak, Quartz, 12 Nov. 2020 The same petrifying dreadfulness marks those intermittent engravings which impute monstrousness—embodied by eruptive owls or witches—to the dreaming states of the putatively rational. — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 14 Sep. 2020 The worst of religious conservatism is on cable news imputing to Trump an almost-Constantinian prestige, uniting nationalist fervor with religious revivalism. — Andrew T. Walker, National Review, 10 Feb. 2020 Vote intentions were imputed onto voter file records in Iowa and then aggregated statewide and by district. — CBS News, 3 Feb. 2020 The analysis imputes usual hours when unavailable or varying, and adjusts weekly earnings for top-coding using a log-linear distributional assumption. — Ernie Tedeschi, New York Times, 3 Jan. 2020 The most significant development was also the most question-begging: the impulse to impute significance to rat kings and therefore to report on them, draw attention to them, and preserve them. — Adrian Daub, Longreads, 13 Dec. 2019

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'impute.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.