So I'm programmatically generating meta descriptions from the first 160 characters of my site's product listing descriptions. (I'm putting a 160 character limit on it. Is that still best practice?) Does it matter if a word at the end of the description gets truncated? So if the word was, say, webmasters, it might get truncated to webmast. I can make it so only whole words are included by dropping the final truncated word, but some sentences will necessarily be chopped in half. Does that also matter?
Does it matter if my meta description is truncated?
seo;meta tags;meta description
Actually Google own support.google.com doc pages using auto generated meta description. Also the words are not truncated properly. In most of cases Google ignore your meta description when user query does not match with your current meta description. For example in above doc the meta description is thisThe payment methods available to you depend on your currency and  country. In most countries, you can set up a credit card, debit card,  or bank account as a primary payment method.You can also set uNow if I type this query on Google search how to change my payment details in google cloud then it will not going to display same meta description for same page, instead they will generate it automatically. And that is why many of people who have large amount of webpages use auto generated meta description. But a good hand-written description may increase CPC, for example if you know there are some query who gives you the most traffic to your site, so based on that query, if you write good meta description then you may get better CTR. But it is purely based on user, because I have seen many people just read your title and not meta description. So it is your choice to what to optimize for better CTR.Regarding ranking they don't use meta description in ranking factor.Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets  we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.Here is also good answer written by stephen about meta description.