EXACTING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does exacting mean? 

• EXACTING (adjective)
  The adjective EXACTING has 3 senses:

1. having complicated nutritional requirements; especially growing only in special artificial cultures

2. severe and unremitting in making demands

3. requiring precise accuracy

  Familiarity information: EXACTING used as an adjective is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• EXACTING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having complicated nutritional requirements; especially growing only in special artificial cultures

Synonyms:

exacting; fastidious

Context example:

certain highly specialized xerophytes are extremely exacting in their requirements

Domain category:

microbiology (the branch of biology that studies microorganisms and their effects on humans)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Severe and unremitting in making demands

Synonyms:

exacting; stern; strict

Context example:

strict standards

Similar:

demanding (requiring more than usually expected or thought due; especially great patience and effort and skill)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Requiring precise accuracy

Synonyms:

exacting; exigent

Context example:

became more exigent over his pronunciation

Similar:

demanding (requiring more than usually expected or thought due; especially great patience and effort and skill)

 Context examples 

Then, you know, being formed for society and admiration, and not being able to enjoy much of it in consequence of their limited means, she naturally gets a little irritable and exacting, sometimes.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

It was Kate Flanagan's best Sunday waist, than whom there was no more exacting and fastidiously dressed woman in Maria's world.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

And first I would have you bear very steadfastly in mind that our setting forth is by no means for the purpose of gaining spoil or exacting ransom, though it may well happen that such may come to us also.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The Russian consul, too, acting for the charter-party, took formal possession of the ship, and paid all harbour dues, etc. Nothing is talked about here to-day except the strange coincidence; the officials of the Board of Trade have been most exacting in seeing that every compliance has been made with existing regulations.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

You were exacting, proud, punctilious, selfish.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I had learnt her whole character, which was without mystery or disguise: she was coquettish but not heartless; exacting, but not worthlessly selfish.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)