Are most authentic Hadiths in meaning and not in exact wording?

The majority of scholars are of the opinion that it is permissible to narrate a Hadith (definition) by its meaning, provided that the narrator is knowledgeable of the subtleties of words, capable of understanding the differences between them, and an expert in what would distort their meanings, such that the meaning remains identical to the original. They based this on the fact that the Companions and the Salaf narrated the same story with different wordings, and that the Ummah has agreed on the permissibility of conveying the meaning of the Prophet's (peace be upon him) narration without using his exact wording or language. A condition for narrating by meaning is that the narrator must be knowledgeable of the meanings of the Hadith. Scholars have excluded from this the divinely prescribed wordings, such as invocations (adhkar), concise comprehensive statements (jawami' al-kalim), and authored books.