English Online Dictionary. What means judgment? What does judgment mean?
English
Alternative forms
- judgement (Commonwealth)
- iugement, iudgement, iudgment, iudgemente, iudgmente (all obsolete)
Etymology
From Middle English juggement, borrowed from Old French jugement, from Late Latin iūdicāmentum, from Latin iūdicō. Displaced native doom.
Morphologically judge + -ment
Pronunciation
- enPR: jŭj'mənt, IPA(key): /ˈd͡ʒʌd͡ʒ.mənt/
Noun
judgment (countable and uncountable, plural judgments)
- The act of judging.
- The power or faculty of performing such operations; especially, when unqualified, the faculty of judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely.
- The conclusion or result of judging; an opinion; a decision.
- (law) The act of determining, as in courts of law, what is conformable to law and justice; also, the determination, decision, or sentence of a court, or of a judge.
- (theology) The final award; the last sentence.
Usage notes
See Judgment: Spelling for discussion of spelling usage of judgment versus judgement. Briefly, the form without the -e is preferred in American English, and in law globally, while the form with the -e is preferred in non-legal use in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South African English. Google Ngram search for the judgment in the British corpus suggests judgment is at least as common in British English as judgement.
Like abridgment, acknowledgment, and lodgment, judgment is sometimes written with ‘British’ spellings in American English, as judgement (respectively, abridgement, acknowledgement, and lodgement).
The British spelling preserves the rule that G can only be soft while preceding an E, I, or Y.
Common collocations include "pass judgment", "make a judgment" and "in one's judgment".
Derived terms
Translations
References
- “judgment”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- “judgment”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- judgment, judgement at the Google Books Ngram Viewer.