immaculate
/ɪˈmakjʊlət
/- Returning from his grimy hours of manual labour, he dives into a hotel to wash away the dirt, emerging clean and immaculate in a fresh suit and tie.
- The driver then turns toward the doorway, smiling and revealing blindingly white, perfectly immaculate teeth.
- He was dressed in an immaculate white suit, and had an absolutely fantastic bushy mustache that twitched like a live squirrel every time he spoke.
Synonyms
- Her leadership resulted in the unit's unprecedented zero Class C mishaps and an immaculate safety track record.
- The European Diving Centre prides itself on an immaculate safety record - not even a hint of an incident in 5 years.
- A troubled doctor who claimed an immaculate professional record has avoided being struck off, despite selling a hoard of potent narcotics from his surgery.
Synonyms
- That's why we're convinced that the pregnancy was an immaculate conception.
- Despite the delay in molt, male plumage does not remain immaculate.
- Catbirds were not expected to eject other catbird eggs because both intra- and interclutch variations in the appearance of their immaculate eggs are small.
Derivatives
immaculacy
- They offer simple explanations to counter misunderstandings, linking Mary's immaculacy to her best-known manifestation of it, the virgin birth.
- As was the case with the themes of light and Mary's immaculacy, the contrast between the Old Order and the New is expressed in ways accessible to both the most and least learned audiences.
- Inscriptions on scrolls held by the various saints all relate to the immaculacy of the Virgin and her power to redeem from sin.
immaculateness
- ‘In their quest for the most perfect likeness of Mary, early Christians discovered that of all God's creatures, none could surpass flowers in suggesting her immaculateness’.
- Most of these are imposing in size and adorned with great monuments and statuary, but their most conspicuous feature is their immaculateness - itself an aspect of democratic culture.
- If its democratic reform fails to achieve this, the government will be suspected of wrongdoing no matter how hard it clarifies its immaculateness.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'free from moral stain'): from Latin immaculatus, from in- 'not' + maculatus 'stained' (from macula 'spot').
For centuries Christian theologians had argued over whether God had preserved the Virgin Mary from the taint of original sin from the moment she was conceived. In 1854 the Vatican declared in favour of the Immaculate Conception and it became a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church. The term involves the earliest, sense of immaculate, ‘free from moral stain’, from Latin in- ‘not’ and macula ‘spot’. The physical sense, ‘spotlessly clean or neat’, dates only from the early 19th century. Similarly, impeccable (mid 16th century) originally meant ‘incapable of sin’, and is still used in this sense in theology, where it has an opposite, peccable (early 17th century) ‘liable to sin’.