adjective
- perfect; complete; whole: absolute silence
- not mixed; pure: absolute alcohol
- not limited by a constitution, parliament, etc.; unrestricted: an absolute ruler
- positive; definite: an absolute certainty
- not doubted; actual; real: an absolute truth
- not dependent on, or without reference to, anything else; not relative
- Gram.
- forming part of a sentence, but not in the usual relations of syntax: in the sentence “The weather being good, they went,” the weather being good is an absolute construction
- used without an explicit object: said of a verb usually transitive, such as steal in the sentence “Thieves steal.”
- used alone, with the noun understood: said of a pronoun or an adjective, such as ours and brave in the sentence “Ours are the brave.”
- Law without condition or encumbrance: absolute ownership
- Physics of the absolute temperature scale
Origin:
ME absolut < L absolutus, pp. of absolvere, to loosen from: see absolve
noun
something that is absolute