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Get Wordy With Verbatim
Latin has a phrase for "exactly as written": verbatim ac litteratim, which literally means "word for word and letter for letter." Like the verbatim in that Latin phrase, the English verbatim means "word for word." As you may have noticed, there's a verb in verbatim—and that's no mere coincidence. Both verb and verbatim are derived from the Latin word for "word," which is verbum. Other common English words that share this root include adverb, proverb, and verbose. Even the word word itself is related. Verbatim can also be an adjective meaning "being in or following the exact words" (as in "a verbatim report") and a rarer noun referring to an account, translation, or report that follows the original word for word.
Synonyms
Examples of verbatim in a Sentence
Sally B. Donnelly et al., Time, 20 Mar. 2006
Some passages in the book are taken verbatim from the blog …
—Publishers Weekly, 13 June 2005
Around his eleventh year he compiled a sort of commonplace book in which he transcribed passages from his reading. … But these entries aren't rendered verbatim: [Arthur] Rimbaud expands and contracts his sources, plays with lines, exhibiting a very early, very organic sort of literary criticism.
—Wyatt Mason, Harper's, October 2002
"My own anxieties about mortality are tempered just slightly," says [Ken] Burns (quoting, almost verbatim, his introduction to "Jazz's" companion coffee-table book), "by the notion that if we continue to try hard, we'll have a chance to hear Louis blow Gabriel out of the clouds."
—David Gates, Newsweek, 8 Jan. 2001
you can't just copy the encyclopedia article verbatim for your report—that's plagiarism
Adjective
Was Coleridge's "Table Talk," as recorded by his circle, his words or theirs—or a conflation of both? And what about Boswell, the most celebrated auditor of them all, who composed a masterpiece of English literature out of the supposedly verbatim speech of Samuel Johnson? Did Johnson begin his every declaration with an orotund "Sir?"
—James Atlas, New York Times Magazine, 23 June 1991
Some readers may unfortunately be made mistrustful of the authors' findings by their attempts to enliven the book with unverifiable—if inconsequential—details about the settings of events and by occasionally presenting unrecorded conversations of four decades ago in the form of verbatim quotations.
—Henry Ashby Turner, New York Times Book Review, 22 June 1986
David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 22 Oct. 2024
According to Leonardi, there were many other times when segments weren’t executed verbatim, with the talent going slightly off script.
—Krystie Lee Yandoli, Rolling Stone, 19 Oct. 2024
Jon Gambrell, Los Angeles Times, 22 Sep. 2024
The earlier film portrays Winner’s interrogation in detail, and its dialogue is based entirely on verbatim excerpts from the audio record of these interactions.
—Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 11 Sep. 2024
See all Example Sentences for verbatim 
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'verbatim.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near verbatim
Cite this Entry
“Verbatim.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verbatim. Accessed 4 Nov. 2024.
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