Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To determine by mathematics, especially by numerical methods: synonym: calculate.
  • intransitive verb To determine by the use of a computer.
  • intransitive verb To determine an amount or number.
  • intransitive verb To use a computer.
  • intransitive verb To be reasonable, plausible, or consistent; make sense.
  • noun Computation.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To determine by calculation; count; reckon; calculate: as, to compute the distance of the moon from the earth.
  • Synonyms Reckon, Count, etc. See calculate.
  • To reckon; count.
  • noun Computation.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To determine by calculation; to reckon; to count.
  • noun rare Computation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To reckon or calculate.
  • verb informal To make sense.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb make a mathematical calculation or computation

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French computer, from Old French, from Latin computāre : com-, com- + putāre, to reckon; see pau- in Indo-European roots. N., Late Latin computus, from Latin computāre, to compute.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French computer (17th century), from Latin computare ("sum up, reckon, compute"), from com ("together") + putare ("cleanse, trim, prune, clear up, settle, adjuct, reckon, count, deem, think, suppose"), from putus ("cleansed, clear")

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Examples

  • Obviously the one thing that Wolfy can't compute is how to have sufficient servers to handle it's user load. palmerkun jthatch

    First Look At Wolfram Alpha’s Impressive Knowledge Computation | Lifehacker Australia 2009

  • You'll probably find (after you spend some time here) that most of us started in Linux because we were looking for a better way to "compute" - we started dual-booting Windows and Linux, but started booting the Linux side more and more often, simply because we can use our machines rather than just having to maintain them all the time.

    PCLinuxOS-Forums 2009

  • 103 His malady increased, and after a dysentery which continued three days, he expired in the palace of Ravenna, in the thirty-third, or, if we compute from the invasion of Italy, in the thirty-seventh year of his reign.

    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1206

  • We’ll be able to compute from the knowledge that our civilization has accumulated.

    Wolfram Blog : Stephen Wolfram on the Quest for Computable Knowledge 2009

  • What doesn’t quite compute is that the robot goes to all this trouble to look and breath like a sex kitten, but the speech is very mechanical in some parts.

    EVENT LOG • by Andrew LeBlanc 2009

  • Senator DEBBIE STABENOW (Democrat, Michigan): At a time when people are losing their jobs, working part-time jobs, seeing their wages go down, and the incomes of the wealthiest 400 people in the country have gone up about 400 percent in the last decade and a half and their tax rates have been cut in half, for the majority of Americans that doesn't compute, that is just not fair.

    The Politics Of A Tax Hike 2010

  • Senator DEBBIE STABENOW (Democrat, Michigan): At a time when people are losing their jobs, working part-time jobs, seeing their wages go down, and the incomes of the wealthiest 400 people in the country have gone up about 400 percent in the last decade and a half and their tax rates have been cut in half, for the majority of Americans that doesn't compute, that is just not fair.

    The Politics Of A Tax Hike 2010

  • Senator DEBBIE STABENOW (Democrat, Michigan): At a time when people are losing their jobs, working part-time jobs, seeing their wages go down, and the incomes of the wealthiest 400 people in the country have gone up about 400 percent in the last decade and a half and their tax rates have been cut in half, for the majority of Americans that doesn't compute, that is just not fair.

    The Politics Of A Tax Hike 2010

  • Senator DEBBIE STABENOW (Democrat, Michigan): At a time when people are losing their jobs, working part-time jobs, seeing their wages go down, and the incomes of the wealthiest 400 people in the country have gone up about 400 percent in the last decade and a half and their tax rates have been cut in half, for the majority of Americans that doesn't compute, that is just not fair.

    The Politics Of A Tax Hike 2010

  • Senator DEBBIE STABENOW (Democrat, Michigan): At a time when people are losing their jobs, working part-time jobs, seeing their wages go down, and the incomes of the wealthiest 400 people in the country have gone up about 400 percent in the last decade and a half and their tax rates have been cut in half, for the majority of Americans that doesn't compute, that is just not fair.

    The Politics Of A Tax Hike 2010

  • “We also did a lot of early safety work on scaling laws,” a term for research into the rate at which models improve as they “scale,” or increase in size and complexity due to increased training runs and access to computer processing (often just called “compute” in machine learning slang).

    The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn’t destroy humanity Dylan Matthews 2023

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