Accountability — What Does It Truly Mean?
It’s a word we use often, but do we actually know what it means?
I have written quite a bit over the past few days about “being accountable”, with only an assumption of what the word actually means. I even included it in the title of one of my main stories this week, discussing my weight loss journey.
Following this realisation, I decided to take a deeper look into what the word accountable truly means. Accountability is one of those “buzzwords” that makes individuals and organisations sound professional and “in the know”. It is a word that is thrown around with ease, without really interrogating what it actually means to be accountable.
Of course, when looking into what a word means, the first place you go to is the dictionary. I was surprised by how many definitions were out there of this word and have collated the definitions from some of the main dictionaries below to see if there were any interesting variations and to identify any common denominators:
