How to use the words Accurate and Precise?


In ordinary usage, accurate and precise are often used as rough synonyms, but scientists like to distinguish between them. Someone could say that a snake is over a meter long and be accurate (the snake really does exceed one meter in length), but that is not a precise measurement.


To be precise, the measurement would have to be more exact: the snake is 1.23 meters long.


The same distinction applies in scientific contexts to the related words accuracy and precision.