impute

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French imputer, from Latin imputō (“to bring into the reckoning, charge, impute”).

verb

1. (transitive) To attribute or ascribe (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source.
   The teacher imputed the student's failure to his nervousness.
   Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, / If mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, / Where thro’ the long-drawn isle and fretted vault, / The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. 1751, Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, lines 37–40
   He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. 1856 February, Thomas Babington Macaulay, “"Oliver Goldsmith"”, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th edition, volume and page numbers unknown
   We ascribe or impute motives to others and avow them or confess to them in ourselves. 1956–1960, Richard Stanley Peters, “2: Motives and Motivation”, in The Concept of Motivation, Routledge & Kegan Paul (second edition, 1960), page 29
2. (transitive, theology) To ascribe (sin or righteousness) to someone by substitution.
   To use the technical language of theologians, God through his grace "imputes" the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this "imputation" would not be "made" righteous at all. 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin (2010), page 607
3. (transitive) To take into account.
   They ſerved with honour in the wars of Bajazet; but a plan of fortifying Conſtantinople excited his jealouſy: he threatened their lives; the new works were inſtantly demoliſhed; and we ſhall beſtow a praiſe, perhaps above the merit of Palæologus, if we impute this laſt humiliation as the cauſe of his death. 1788, Edward Gibbon, “Chapter 64: A.D. 1355–1391: The Emperor John Palæologus; Discord of the Greeks”, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 6, page 328
4. (transitive) To attribute or credit to.
   People impute great cleverness to cats.
   In any case, the practices imputed to Shakespeare as an emergent dramatist were not in the least exceptional. 2014, Janet Clare, Shakespeare's Stage Traffic, page 11
5. (transitive, statistics) To replace missing data with substituted values.
   We will use a logistic regression model to impute values of nominal and ordinal variables and a linear regression model to impute values of continuous variables. 2010, Mamdouh Refaat, Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS, Elsevier, page 184
   remove observed values and impute 2012, Stef van Buuren, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data, page 263