veritas

Veritas, veritatis, f., third declension. It is verus, "true", plus the suffix -tas, the standard Latin machine for turning a quality into an abstract noun: civis gives civitas, liber gives libertas. The plural is rare and means individual truths.

Classical Latin uses it both for truth as fact and for truthfulness as a character trait. The scholastic corpus adds a technical sense, the correspondence between a thing and the mind that grasps it, and Christian writers use it outright as a name for God. Note that credo takes the dative, so it is veritati credere, not veritatem. Spanish verdad and French vérité descend from it, and English has verity, verify, veritable and, oddly, very, which began life meaning "true".