Definitions

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

  • noun Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.
  • noun The state of being unimpaired; soundness.
  • noun The quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state of being integral; unimpaired extent, amount, or constitution; wholeness; completeness.
  • noun Unimpaired condition; soundness of state; freedom from corruption or impurity.
  • noun Unimpaired morality; soundness of moral principle and character; entire uprightness or fidelity.
  • noun Probity, Uprightness, etc. See honesty.

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

  • noun The state or quality of being entire or complete; wholeness; entireness; unbroken state.
  • noun Moral soundness; honesty; freedom from corrupting influence or motive; -- used especially with reference to the fulfillment of contracts, the discharge of agencies, trusts, and the like; uprightness; rectitude.
  • noun Unimpaired, unadulterated, or genuine state; entire correspondence with an original condition; purity.

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

  • noun Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.
  • noun The state of being wholesome; unimpaired
  • noun The quality or condition of being complete; pure
  • noun cryptography With regards to data encryption, ensuring that information is not altered by unauthorized persons in a way that is not detectable by authorized users.
  • noun aviation The ability of a system to provide timely warnings to users when they should not be used for navigation.

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

  • noun an undivided or unbroken completeness or totality with nothing wanting
  • noun moral soundness

Etymologies

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

[Middle English integrite, from Old French, from Latin integritās, soundness, from integer, whole, complete; see tag- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin integritās ("soundness, integrity"), from integer.

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Examples

Comments

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  • The virtue of being a positive whole number, or zero.

    February 26, 2007

  • Weird, because integer means any whole number, positive or negative or zero. Using natural implies any positive whole number. I question the validity of this MW definition.

    February 27, 2007

  • Not being a mathematical type, I will maintain that any number identified as negative cannot be a number of integrity. It's a morals thing. There's nothing "natural" about miscreants like that.

    February 27, 2007

  • I have to question the integrity of a definition which falsely ascribes to the integers the requirement that they be greater than zero. Morality has nothing to do with it; the facts are as seanahan has said; the natural numbers are the positive whole numbers (sometimes called the counting numbers). The integers correspond to all whole numbers, negative or positive, and zero, by definition. Whimsy is all well and good, but not applied to such basic mathematical ideas as the integers.

    (end of harrumphing diatribe)

    Added on edit; I'm a little confused though, because Merriam Webster doesn't have anything about positive numbers in the definition of integrity. For integer it has

    "any of the natural numbers, the negatives of these numbers, or zero".

    February 27, 2007

  • You realize, of course, that my daffynition was never intended to open such a can of worms...

    February 27, 2007