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Glite Dictionary
fair copy

fair copy

6.2
A clean final version of a document with all corrections
  • noun
  • Specialized
translation icon : copia limpia
  • After reviewing the draft, he produced a fair copy to present at the meeting.
  • make a fair copy

Examples

  • He made a fair copy, which he sanded and addressed.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • The author submitted a fair copy of the manuscript after making all necessary corrections.

  • She neatly prepared a fair copy of the report for the final submission.

Antonyms

rough
122 2.8

Not exact, only a simple first idea

How Clean

fair copy
  • Specialized
6.2
draft copy
1 3.4

Surface Forms

fair copy singular
fair copies plural

Morphology

fair + copy

The sense 'a clean, final version' is partly inferable from 'fair' (as acceptable/adequate) combined with 'copy' (a duplicate/document), so a learner could guess it means a good or proper copy. However, 'fair' does not commonly mean 'free of corrections' in general usage and the phrase has a somewhat formal, register-specific meaning that may not be fully predictable without prior exposure.

Etymology

Fair copy may come from the time when a writer rewrote a messy draft neatly on a fresh page so the result looked fair (that is, neat) and was a clean copy. So, fair copy came to mean a clean, corrected 'final' document ready to hand in.