unerring means consistently accurate; not missing a target. It carries an Arena rating of 1593, earned across 6 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, unerring ranks #50 of 17,113 for Most Elegant Words, #5,429 of 17,130 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #7,257 of 17,123 for Most Malleable Words, #7,330 of 17,125 for Most Incisive Words.
unerring is pronounced /ʌnˈɜːɹ.ɪŋ/.
Why “unerring” is a great word
Consistently accurate and incapable of error. From the English prefix un- ("not") and the present participle erring (from Old English ierre, "wandering, straying"), thus meaning "not wandering or straying." First recorded in English between 1610 and 1620. Unlike "erratic," which implies a wavering, unpredictable course, or "fallible," which concedes a fundamental susceptibility to mistake, unerring describes a path of such unwavering fidelity that deviation is a conceptual impossibility. It is the archer's arrow finding the bullseye in total darkness, the needle of a compass holding true north through a storm, or the homing instinct of a migrating bird across a trackless sea—a perfect alignment that feels less like a skill and more like a law of nature.
adj
- consistently accurate; not missing a target.e.g.“1717: Hissing in air the unerring weapon flew. -- John Dryden's 1697–1700 translation of "The Story of Meleager and Atalanta", in Ovid's Metamorphoses (tr. Garth, Dryden, et al.), book VIII, pub. 1717”
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