Rigorous Meaning
/ˈɹɪɡəɹəs/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
adjShowing, causing, or favoring rigour/rigor; scrupulously accurate or strict; thorough.
adjSevere; intense.
Sentence Examples
The top engineer put the car through a series of rigorous tests.
The argument is rigorous and coherent but ultimately unconvincing.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The ____ military training required soldiers to run ten miles daily without breaks.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The selection process was extremely ____, with candidates required to pass multiple tests and interviews.
Word Origin & History
Inherited from Middle English rigorous, from Middle French and Anglo-Norman rigoreus, derived from Late Latin rigōrōsus (stiff, rigid; inflexible). By surface analysis, rigor + -ous.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"From this time onwards, the Westinghouse air brake literally went from strength to strength, and was triumphantly justified in the course of rigorous trials, both on the Pennsylvania Railroad and at Newark-on-Trent in this country."
— 1946 November and December, “George Westinghouse, 1846-1914”, in Railway Magazine, page 375:
"Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month."
— 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
Explore More C1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The ____ military training required soldiers to run ten miles daily without breaks.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The selection process was extremely ____, with candidates required to pass multiple tests and interviews.