faithful

Pluralfaithfuls

1. 1
   adjective

   Loyal and firmly devoted to a person or a cause.

   He remained faithful to the union through three long strikes.

   The senator thanked her faithful supporters, many of whom had campaigned for her since her first race.

   Similarloyal, devoted, true, steadfast, staunch

   Oppositedisloyal, faithless, treacherous

   Note

   The word is simply faith plus -ful, already joined in Middle English feithful. As loyalty it takes to before its object, faithful to the union, faithful to a friend, and it is the natural word for a dog that wants no one else's hand on it.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having sexual relations only with one's spouse or long-term partner.

   Staying faithful through two years of a long-distance relationship took real commitment.

   He insisted he had always been faithful to his wife, but the messages on his phone told a different story.

   Similartrue, loyal, monogamous

   Oppositeunfaithful, adulterous

3. 3
   adjective

   Accurately reflecting reality or the real thing being described or copied.

   The museum built a faithful replica of the ship, down to the hand-carved figurehead.

   Critics praised the translation as faithful to the original without sounding stiff.

   Similaraccurate, exact, true, precise, close

   Oppositeinaccurate, loose, free

4. 4
   adjective

   Dependable and deserving of trust.

   The faithful old furnace kept the farmhouse warm through another hard winter.

   For forty years she was a faithful correspondent, answering every letter within a week.

   Similarreliable, dependable, trusty, trustworthy, constant

   Oppositeunreliable, undependable, untrustworthy

5. 5
   nounplural

   The people who practice a religion or follow a cause, considered as a group.

   Thousands of the faithful gathered in the square for the Easter blessing.

   The candidate saved his fiercest lines for the party faithful in the front rows.

   Similarbelievers, followers, loyalists, flock

   Note

   The adjective serves here as a group noun: it comes with the and takes a plural verb, as in the faithful pray five times a day, and it is not given an -s. It stretches from religion to any cause, so a party has its faithful too, and in Dune the saying goes that God created Arrakis "to train the faithful."

6. 6
   adjective

   Having faith, especially firm religious belief.

   Faithful Catholics were urged to attend Mass on the holy day.

   Though he became a scientist, he stayed faithful all his life and saw no conflict between prayer and research.

   Similardevout, pious, religious, observant

   Oppositelapsed, unbelieving, irreligious

7. 7
   nouncountable

   A loyal or reliable person or thing, one that can always be counted on.

   When someone in the house gets sick, chicken soup is the old faithful we turn to.

   The restaurant changed its menu but kept the old faithfuls that regulars order every week.

   Similarstandby, staple, favorite, classic, stalwart

   Note

   It is usually met as old faithful, and unlike the faithful as a group it is countable: Bruce DeMara wrote in the Toronto Star in 2009 of the "tried-and-true old faithfuls" a theater might have fallen back on. It suits a familiar play, a dish or a tool as readily as a person.

8. 8
   adjective

   Injective in a specific setting, as said of a representation in representation theory or a functor in category theory.

   The regular representation of any finite group is faithful.

   The forgetful functor from groups to sets is faithful but not full.

   Note

   A faithful representation sends different group elements to different linear maps, so the group survives intact in its image. For a functor the test runs one pair of objects at a time: distinct arrows between the same two objects stay distinct, even if different objects are sent to the same one. Full is the companion condition, and a functor can be one without the other.

9. 9
   adjective

   Of a module over a ring: having zero annihilator, so that no nonzero ring element sends every element of the module to zero.

   Because 6 annihilates every element of Z/6Z, that module is not faithful over the integers.

   Every nonzero torsion-free abelian group is faithful as a module over the integers.

   Note

   This is the injective meaning in module form: a module is faithful exactly when the map sending each ring element to its action is injective, so different ring elements always act differently. Over the integers no finite abelian group passes the test, since some nonzero integer sends all of its elements to zero.

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