cases

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of case.

   Detectives across the city were assigned dozens of unsolved cases.

   The museum displayed its rarest coins inside locked glass cases.

   Note

   One plural covers several very different nouns. A lawyer's cases are lawsuits or prosecutions. A professional's cases are the people and tasks on the books. A grammarian's cases are the inflected forms a noun or pronoun takes for its role in a sentence. Context does all the sorting, so the setting has to make clear which kind is meant. The same spelling also serves as the verb form.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of case.

   A careful burglar always cases the building before attempting a break-in.

   The packer cases the fragile glassware in molded inserts for shipping.

   Note

   Every living use of this form takes a direct object: a packer cases glassware, a thief cases a building. The surveying use is informal, as in cases the joint. The watcher need not be a criminal, since a detective can case a place too. An older intransitive use meant proposing hypothetical cases, and it is now obsolete.

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