MEANING
1. Approval or endorsement given by a person or institution with recognized authority.
2. An official authorization to print or publish a work, especially one granted by a Catholic bishop.
Use it for
describing a policy bearing official approval; showing that a proposal has institutional backing; questioning an appeal to prestige instead of evidence; distinguishing endorsement from independent verificationDistinguishes an authority’s endorsement from evidence that the endorsed claim is independently correct. Writing functions: Evidence / Institutional authority, Argumentation.
Words that belong together
- bear the imprimatur of
- give a proposal one’s imprimatur
- official imprimatur
On the page
The report bore the ministry’s imprimatur, but its assumptions still required scrutiny.
Publication in the series gave the new approach an institutional imprimatur.
The historian compared the book’s imprimatur with the restrictions described in the correspondence.
A bishop granted an imprimatur for the revised edition.
Word forms
- Base
- imprimatur
Usage notes
Noun, often singular with a possessive: an institution’s imprimatur. Plural imprimaturs. The historical publishing sense is more specialized. Register: formal. Commonness: uncommon (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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