Fidelity means being loyal and faithful to a person, promise, or duty. It can also describe how accurately something, like a recording, copies the original sound or image.
It comes from Latin “fidelitas,” meaning “faithfulness,” from “fides,” meaning “faith” or “trust.” The word has long carried both moral and technical senses of “staying true.”
“Fidelity,” “faith,” and “confidence” are distant cousins, all rooted in the idea of trust. High-fidelity audio is literally “faithful sound,” staying as true as possible to what was originally played.
"Fidelity" has long been used in moral and legal discourses about marital and sexual behavior, often policed more harshly for women than for men. The term also appears in technical contexts (signal fidelity) that are not gendered.
When discussing relational fidelity, avoid double standards or assumptions that link women’s value more closely to sexual fidelity than men’s. In technical contexts, the term is generally neutral and unproblematic.
["faithfulness","accuracy","loyalty","signal quality"]
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