personal equation


noun
  1. the tendency to personal bias that accounts for variation in interpretation or approach and for which allowance must be made.

Origin of personal equation

1
First recorded in 1835–45

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use personal equation in a sentence

  • Above and beyond all these considerations, the personal equation comes in, sometimes very powerfully.

  • Indeed, one would be doing no great violence to language who defined this quality as the “personal equation” of a work.

  • Other and better men have noted the damage that the personal equation does to music, and some of them have even sought ways out.

    Damn! | Henry Louis Mencken
  • They work out these things in the personal equation largely.

  • Such prejudices as our history has encouraged in us must be recognized, and computed in our personal equation.

    The Psychology of Nations | G.E. Partridge

British Dictionary definitions for personal equation

personal equation

noun
  1. the variation or error in observation or judgment caused by individual characteristics

  2. the allowance made for such variation

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012