terminologicaladj.

1773 London Mag. Oct. 508/1 Some learned pedants have confused, instead of illustrating natural history, by their over-hasty zeal in building systems, arranging classes, and specifying the terminological distinctions.

1823 Edinb. Med. & Surg. Jrnl. 19 631 Medicine has been defined, by those skilled in terminological lore and scholastic distinction, to be the art of prolonging life and curing disease.

1873 Examiner 2 Aug. 788/2 The temptation to conceal their greater or lesser mysteries under the formal terminological cover which the natural intricacies of the subject might be supposed to demand.

1916 Polit. Sci. Q. 31 444 Terminological reform stands of course on the firm justification that if you call things by names that associate them wrongly you cannot manage to make the right affirmations about these things.

1959 New Scientist 20 Aug. 251/1 ‘Ministry’ as a synonym for the headquarters staff alone is the sort of terminological inaccuracy which can either arise from or lead to inaccurate thinking.

2003 Anthropologica 45 241/1 The social and political consequences of these terminological twists and turns should not be assumed to be trivial in any way.

1906 W. S. Churchill in Parl. Deb. 4th Ser. 152 555 A labour contract into which men enter voluntarily..cannot..be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

1940 C. Milburn Diary 19 July (1979) 49 I can't think..why he [sc. Hitler] does not choke himself with his ‘terminological inexactitudes’!

1976 A. Price War Game i. viii. 159 It all adds up to a little terminological inexactitude—he was lying through his goddamn teeth.

2015 Guardian (Nexis) 16 June His pretence that he'd been ‘over-interpreted’ was a new addition to the lexicon of terminological inexactitudes.