Judge

How to spell judge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce judge

What does judge mean?

1. nounA public official with authority to hear and decide cases in a court of law.
2. verbTo form an opinion about something, or to officially decide a case or contest.

Judge in a sentence

• noun

  The judge sentenced the defendant to four years in prison.

• verb

  It is unfair to judge a colleague before hearing the full story.

• noun

  A senior judge presided over the appeal hearing.

• verb

  Experts will judge each entry on flavour and presentation.

Where does judge come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin judex, meaning 'one who pronounces the law', a compound built from jus 'law' or 'right' and the root of dicere 'to say' or 'to declare'. From judex came the verb judicare, 'to judge' or 'to decide a case', and English took the word in through Old French juge and the verb jugier during the 1200s. The earlier Latin spelling with that hard 'd' explains why we still write the silent-looking 'dg' in the middle, where the 'd' and the 'g' together carry the single soft sound. The same jus and dicere roots survive in a whole family of legal words such as 'judicial', 'jury', and 'prejudice', all sharing the idea of speaking what the law requires. The main spelling trap is the closing silent 'e' and the 'dg' cluster, which fluent writers occasionally reduce to a single letter when typing quickly.

How the word is built

• judg- (from Latin judex, one who declares the law: jus 'law'
• dicere 'to say')
• -e