justified

1. 1
   adjective

   Supported by good reason; shown to be right, reasonable, or warranted.

   The board considered the budget cuts justified given the shortfall.

   His suspicion proved justified once the missing documents surfaced.

   Similarwarranted, reasonable, valid, legitimate, well-founded

   Oppositeunjustified, unwarranted, unfounded, groundless

   Note

   A gradable adjective of judgment: something can be more justified or most justified, and fully justified is its natural intensified form, as in an act that was fully justified. Outside typography that phrase means entirely warranted. On a printed page it names the aligned-margins meaning, so context has to settle which one is meant.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of justify.

   The manager justified the layoffs by pointing to falling sales.

   The new evidence justified reopening the closed case.

   Note

   Past tense and participle share one spelling, and the adjectives use it too. That means a sentence like "the decision was justified" can be either a passive verb or a description. Add an agent and it is plainly the verb: "was justified by the figures." The verb also has a reflexive use ("justified himself") and a theological one: absolved and declared free of sin.

3. 3
   adjective

   Of text, arranged so the left and right edges of all lines align evenly, with the spacing between words adjusted as needed to fill each line.

   Most newspaper columns are justified, giving each block a clean rectangular shape.

   The designer kept the body text justified but left the photo captions ragged.

   Oppositeragged

   Note

   A typesetter's term with a family of relatives. Plain justified, or fully justified, means both edges line up. Left-justified and right-justified each align only one edge and leave the other ragged. When a designer calls text justified without qualification, both margins are meant, and the uneven word spacing is the price of the clean block.

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