evaluate
Formsevaluates, evaluating, evaluated
- 1To examine something carefully and draw conclusions about it; to assess or appraise its quality or value.
The committee will evaluate every proposal before awarding the grant.
Analysts spent weeks evaluating the company's financial health.
Similarassess, appraise, judge, review, analyze
Note
A verb made backward: evaluation came first, and evaluate was formed by stripping the ending from the noun that already existed. It always takes a direct object. You evaluate the material, the evidence, even your own worth, and the word implies a judgment reached after study rather than at a glance. Assess and appraise are its closest companions here.
- 2In mathematics or computing, to work out the value that an expression stands for or produces.
Students were asked to evaluate the integral using substitution.
The interpreter evaluates a function's arguments before passing them in.
Note
The mathematician's and programmer's use, where the object is always an expression (an integral, a formula, a function's arguments) and the subject is whoever or whatever does the computing, whether a student or an interpreter. Evaluating means carrying out the operations an expression specifies until a single result remains. When the expression itself becomes the subject, the verb turns intransitive, as in the "evaluates to" use.
- 3To yield or have a specific value as the result of computation.
Under these substitutions, both formulas evaluate to zero.
The conditional expression evaluates to false whenever the list is empty.
Note
Here the expression is the subject, and the verb travels with to: an integral evaluates to a probability, an element evaluates to a scalar. The construction belongs to technical prose in algebra, statistics and programming, and it lets a writer state a result without naming who computed it. Avoid a direct object. An expression evaluates to zero; it does not evaluate zero.
Practice
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Origin
This word was formed from "evaluation" by dropping part of it (a back-formation).