Verisimilitude

Research

The appearance or quality of being true or real; in philosophy of science (Popper), a formal concept for how close a theory comes to the truth — the closer, the greater its verisimilitude, even short of being fully true.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — verisimilitude merriam-webster.com accessed 17 September 2026
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Truthlikeness”, Gustavo Cevolani (first published 11 July 2001; substantive revision 21 November 2022) plato.stanford.edu accessed 22 September 2026

Merriam-Webster’s entry is, unusually, circular: “the quality or state of being verisimilar”, and “something verisimilar”. The etymology carries the meaning instead — borrowed from Latin vērīsimilitūdō, from vērī similis, “having the appearance of truth”. First recorded circa 1576.

The technical sense is the subject of Gustavo Cevolani’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on truthlikeness, which begins from the point that “The dichotomy of the class of propositions into truths and falsehoods needs to be supplemented with a more fine-grained ordering” — ranking propositions by “their degree of truthlikeness, or their verisimilitude.” On the history: “Karl Popper was the first philosopher to take the logical problem of truthlikeness seriously enough to make an assay on it.”

The dictionary citation above sources the word, its history and its ordinary meaning. The technical sense this entry defines — which the dictionary does not record, as this page previously stated — is now sourced to a signed, dated reference entry in the discipline’s own literature.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.