Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary - judge

(judges, judging, judged) Frequency: The word is one of the 1500 most common words in English. 1. A judge is the person in a court of law who decides how the law should be applied, for example how criminals should be punished. The judge adjourned the hearing until next Tuesday... Judge Mr Justice Schiemann jailed him for life. N-COUNT; N-TITLE 2. A judge is a person who decides who will be the winner of a competition. A panel of judges is now selecting the finalists. N-COUNT 3. If you judge something such as a competition, you decide who or what is the winner. Colin Mitchell will judge the entries each week... A grade B judge could only be allowed to judge alongside a qualified grade A judge. VERB: V n, V • judging The judging was difficult as always. N-UNCOUNT 4. If you judge something or someone, you form an opinion about them after you have examined the evidence or thought carefully about them. It will take a few more years to judge the impact of these ideas... I am ready to judge any book on its merits... It’s for other people to judge how much I have improved... The UN withdrew its relief personnel because it judged the situation too dangerous... I judged it to be one of the worst programmes ever screened... The doctor judged that the man’s health had, up to the time of the wound, been good... VERB: V n, V n on n, V wh, V n adj, V n to-inf, V that 5. If you judge something, you guess its amount, size, or value or you guess what it is. It is important to judge the weight of your washing load correctly... I judged him to be about forty... Though the shoreline could be dimly seen, it was impossible to judge how far away it was... = estimate VERB: V n, V n to-inf, V wh 6. If someone is a good judge of something, they understand it and can make sensible decisions about it. If someone is a bad judge of something, they cannot do this. I’m a pretty good judge of character... N-COUNT: usu sing, usu N of n 7. You use judging by, judging from, or to judge from to introduce the reasons why you believe or think something. Judging by the opinion polls, he seems to be succeeding... Judging from the way he laughed as he told it, it was meant to be humorous... PREP-PHRASE 8. If you say that something is true as far as you can judge or so far as you can judge, you are assuming that it is true, although you do not know all the facts about it. The book, so far as I can judge, is remarkably accurate. PHRASE: PHR with cl