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I always thought that trustedness was a word, but apparently it isn't. What's a real word that means the same thing, namely the quality of being trusted? Note that this is a different meaning from trustworthiness, which means the quality of being deserving of trust, not of actually being trusted.

To clarify, I am looking for a word which divorces popular judgment from my personal judgment. If 99% of people trust a person, but I don't, I would say that he is trusted, but not, in my opinion, trustworthy. I'm looking for a noun form of the former specifically, or a synonym if it doesn't exist (I don't think it does).

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    What precisely do you want to say? You need to provide a context before asking a question. This is too open-ended. "He's trusted" is good enough. "She possesses the quality of trustedness" is pompous and pretentiously prolix. "They're reliable" isn't much different in meaning or connotation: somebody trusts them because somebody says that they're reliable. Give us an example of what you'd like to say, please.
    – user21497
    Oct 9, 2012 at 3:38
  • I'm trying to automatically determine how an author of a scientific article feels about the articles he cites. That is, I'm trying to determine (using sentiment analysis) how much one article "trusts" another. It would be nice to have a word for that metric. Oct 9, 2012 at 3:42
  • I think there's a difference between reliability (or trustworthiness) and trustedness, since if I say an article is trustworthy, it implies that I think it's a good article. If I say that it's trusted, I mean that other people think that it's a good article. Oct 9, 2012 at 3:44
  • @MatthewPiziak You should be adding all this pertinent information to the question. Oct 9, 2012 at 3:53
  • I've been reading scientific articles (mostly biomedical) every day for the past 15 years & can't remember ever seeing scientists making overt value judgments about the work of their colleagues. When they do, they usually say simply that "our results & theirs contradict each other. Perhaps that's because of different study populations, testing methods, or XYZs". The fact that a scientist cites an article is no indication of trust, just that it supports the author's point. It's persuasion, not sentiment. One phrase that comes to mind, though: seminal article = Trust.
    – user21497
    Oct 9, 2012 at 3:54

3 Answers 3

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I'd opine that "trustedness' has its place as a real word, even if not in the sense that some may use it. In some cases it seems to be the bests word available for the job.

Consider an organisation assessing the degree to which various Banks are trusted by customers. Their client believes that they are "top dog" in the field and wish to use the slogan "The world's most trusted bank." They devise a rating scale that takes various factors into account to assess the "degree of trustedness" which a bank has achieved. This could certainly be expressed differently such as degree to which they are trusted, % of respondents who said the bank was highly trusted etc, but "trustedness" seems to be a wholly meaningful and understandable term for use in such a situation and I cannot think of another word which better encompasses the shades of meaning which are intended in this case.


A webs search indicates that the term 'trustedness' is used, with clear intent and without explanation, in a computer security context. That suggests it may be a "real word" that the dictionaries have 'not quite yet caught up with'.

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  • While it’s true that English is a living language, I don’t know if we necessarily should go adding definitions that are specific to the jargon of a particular industry, or to management-speak, or the like. For example, I’ve met plenty of folks with MBAs who treat the word “action” as a verb.
    – Ascendant
    Oct 9, 2012 at 6:40
  • @Ascendant Actually, action has been used as a verb as early as 1844 in the legal sense. The MBA sense is more recent, but it's already been in use since at least 2004. Oct 9, 2012 at 14:43
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If the context of “trustedness” is how much a specific entity A trusts a specific entity B, I’d opt for a phrase like “level of trust” or “degree of trust.”

“Trustworthiness” is good if you’re not really specific about who entity B is trusted by. Related synomyms such as “reliability” “loyalty” etc. are more specific and likely preferable in cases where they are appropriate to the context.

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Here are some:

reliability, fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty, dependability

Which one you want exactly really does, as mentioned in the comments, depend on context, but this list should give you a start.

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  • If I say that something is any of these, it functions as my own endorsement. What I'm looking for is a metric of other people's opinions, divorced from my own. Oct 9, 2012 at 3:45
  • @MatthewPiziak, does it work to say that you are gauging the article's dependability or reliability? I can see that the others I listed wouldn't work, but I wrote my answer shortly before you provided the clarification in the comments. I do see that what you're after is quite precise.
    – JAM
    Oct 9, 2012 at 3:48
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    @MatthewPiziak: Give us an example sentence & use [X] as the mystery word. That will help. JAM is asking for exactly what I asked for, but you aren't giving it.
    – user21497
    Oct 9, 2012 at 3:56

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