fidelity
American Heritage Dictionary:
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fi·del·i·ty
(fĭ-dĕl'ĭ-tē, fī-) 
n., pl., -ties.
n., pl., -ties.
- Faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances.
- Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event; accuracy.
- The degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.
[Middle English fidelite, from Old French, from Latin fidēlitās, from fidēlis, faithful, from fidēs, faith.]
SYNONYMS fidelity, allegiance, fealty, loyalty. These nouns denote faithfulness. Fidelity implies the unfailing fulfillment of one's duties and obligations and strict adherence to vows or promises: fidelity to one's spouse. Allegiance is faithfulness considered as a duty: "I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance-=@ellipsis4=- The Union, Sir, is my country" (Henry Clay). Fealty, once applied to the obligation of a tenant or vassal to a feudal lord, now suggests faithfulness that one has pledged to uphold: swore fealty to the laws of that country. Loyalty implies a steadfast and devoted attachment that is not easily turned aside: loyalty to an oath; loyalty to one's family.
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The degree to which the output of a system accurately reproduces the essential characteristics of its input signal. Thus, high fidelity in a sound system means that the reproduced sound is virtually indistinguishable from that picked up by the microphones in the recording or broadcasting studio. Similarly, a television system has a high fidelity when the picture seen on the screen of a receiver corresponds in essential respects to that picked up by the television camera. Fidelity is achieved by designing each part of a system to have minimum distortion, so that the waveform of the signal is unchanged as it travels through the system. See also Distortion (electronic circuits); Sound-reproducing systems.
Barron's Marketing Dictionary:
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fidelity
Accuracy with which an electronic recording device can reproduce the original sound or image. The primary value of all recording equipment lies in the exactness of its ability to reproduce the original sounds and/or images (in comparison, of course, to its price).
Roget's Thesaurus:
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fidelity
noun
- Faithfulness or devotion to a person, a cause, obligations, or duties: allegiance, constancy, faithfulness, fealty, loyalty, steadfastness. See continue/stop/pause, obligation.
- Correspondence with fact or truth: accuracy, correctness, exactitude, exactness, truth, veraciousness, veracity, veridicality, verity. See true/false.
Antonyms by Answers.com:
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fidelity
n
Definition: conformity to standard
Antonyms: inconstancy, nonconformity, unsteadiness, vacillation, wavering
n
Definition: faithfulness in a relationship
Antonyms: disloyalty, faithlessness, infidelity, lying, treachery
Devil's Dictionary:
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fidelity
A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce
n.
A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Quotes About:
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Fidelity
Quotes:
"Another of our highly prized virtues is fidelity. We are immensely pleased with ourselves when we are faithful."
- Ida R. Wylie
"What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say."
- Oscar Wilde
"People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failures."
- Oscar Wilde
"Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Fidelity is seven-tenths of business success."
- James Parton
"Constancy is the complement of all other human virtues."
- Giuseppe Mazzini
See more famous quotes about Fidelity
Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry:
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fidelity
Random House Word Menu:
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categories related to 'fidelity'
- Television Technology - fidelity: accuracy and clarity of image and sound reproduction
See crossword solutions for the clue Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Fidelity
For other uses, see Fidelity (disambiguation).
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Look up fidelity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Fidelity is the quality of being faithful or loyal. Its original meaning regarded duty to a lord or a king, in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty. Both derive from the Latin word fidēlis, meaning "faithful or loyal".
In modern human relationships, the term can refer to sexual monogamy. In western culture this often means adherence to marriage vows, or of promises of exclusivity or monogamy, and an absence of adultery. However, some people do not equate fidelity in personal relationships with sexual or emotional monogamy. (For example, see polyamory and Open marriage.) Often, however, females in Shakespeare are associated with it in a negative sense, such as "She is with little fidelity". For example, Bertram accuses Helena of having "little fidelity" in All's Well That Ends Well.
Fidelity also denotes how accurate a copy is to its source. For example, a worn gramophone record will have a lower fidelity than one in good condition, and a recording made by a low budget record company in the early 20th century is likely to have significantly less audio fidelity than a good modern recording. In the 1950s, the terms "high fidelity" or "hi-fi" were popularized for equipment and recordings which exhibited more accurate sound reproduction. The converse term "lo-fi", doesn't necessarily mean "low fidelity", rather that the production ethic aims for "gritty authenticity" over perfect production. Similarly in electronics, fidelity refers to the correspondence of the output signal to the input signal, rather than sound quality.
In the fields of scientific modelling and simulation, fidelity refers to the degree to which a model or simulation reproduces the state and behaviour of a real world object, feature or condition. Fidelity is therefore a measure of the realism of a model or simulation.[1] Simulation fidelity has also been described in the past as "degree of similarity".[2]
The computer age has spawned the term Wi-Fi in reference to certain groups of wireless electronic devices. While the term "Wi-Fi" has erroneously been taken to be an abbreviation of "wireless fidelity", Wi-Fi is in fact a commercial brand owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, and has nothing to do with fidelity as a concept.
In the field of program evaluation, the term fidelity denotes how closely a set of procedures were implemented as they were supposed to have been. For example, it's difficult to draw conclusions from a study about formative assessment in school classrooms if the teachers are not able or willing to follow the procedures they received in training.[3]
References
- ^ "SISO-REF-002-1999: Fidelity Implementation Study Group Report". http://www.sisostds.org/index.php?tg=fileman&idx=get&id=5&gr=Y&path=SISO+Products%2FSISO+Reference+Products&file=99S-SIW-167.doc.
- ^ Hays, R.; Singer, M. (1989). Simulation fidelity in training system design: Bridging the gap between reality and training. Springer-Verlag.
- ^ O’Donnell, Carol (2008). "Defining, Conceptualizing, and Measuring Fidelity of Implementation and Its Relationship to Outcomes in K–12 Curriculum Intervention Research". Review of Educational Research 78 (1): 33-84. doi:10.3102/0034654307313793. http://rer.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/78/1/33. Retrieved March 6, 2010.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Translations:
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Fidelity
Dansk (Danish)
n. - troskab, trofasthed
Nederlands (Dutch)
trouw, nauwkeurigheid, natuurgetrouwheid
Français (French)
n. - (Élec, Télécom) fidélité
Deutsch (German)
n. - Treue, Wiedergabetreue
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πιστότητα, ακρίβεια (απόδοσης κ.λπ.), αφοσίωση, (συζυγική) πίστη
Português (Portuguese)
n. - fidelidade (f)
Русский (Russian)
преданность, верность, точность, правильность
Español (Spanish)
n. - fidelidad, lealtad
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - trohet (mot), naturtrohet
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
忠实, 忠诚, 诚实
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 忠實, 忠誠, 誠實
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 忠実, 忠誠, 貞節, 原物そっくり, 忠実度, 適合度, 厳守
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) ولاء , إخلاص
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - נאמנות, דייקנות, דיוק
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American Heritage Dictionary
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Encyclopedia
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Copyright © 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Dictionary of Marketing Terms. Copyright © 2000 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 byHoughton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry
Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology © 1997, 2000, 2006 All rights reserved.
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