Other forms: adjusted, adjusting, adjusts
To adjust something is to change it a little, until it sits exactly right. The wing mirror before you drive off, the strap on a rucksack, the thermostat nudged up by one degree.
Adjust is small and precise: you adjust a price, a seat, a deadline, your glasses. With TO, it turns inward — you adjust to a new city, to a new baby, to working nights; the thing being changed is you. The noun is adjustment, 'a small adjustment to the plan', and adjustable describes anything built to be changed: an adjustable spanner, an adjustable desk. Accounts and insurance use it drily, in adjusted figures and adjusted returns. Keep it for small changes: you adapt a whole building, you adjust its heating.
1verbadjustTo make a small change to something so that it fits or works better.~45%
“He adjusted the mirror before pulling out into the traffic.”
2verbnewTo get used to a new situation.~53%
“It took her a month to adjust to the early starts.”
3verbmoveTo move a piece of clothing slightly into place.~2%
“He adjusted his tie in the hallway mirror.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: tweak
Adjust reached English twice. Middle English had ajusten from Middle French, meaning to correct or remedy; the word was then borrowed again from French in the early 1600s. Its shape leans on Latin ad, towards, and iustus, correct or exact — to adjust is to move something towards exact. Another account traces it instead to Old French ajouster, from Latin iuxta, next to, with iustus arriving later as a guess that stuck.
Vulgar Latin
*adiuxtāre
Old French
ajouster
Latin
ad — to, up to, towards
Middle French
adjuster
Middle English
ajusten
English, today
adjust
Built from
From Middle English ajusten, borrowed from Middle French adjuster, or Old French -, from Latin ad (“to, up to, towards”) + iustus (“correct, proper, exact”); Equivalent to ad + just. Probably influenced in sense by Old French ajouster (cf. modern ajouter), from Vulgar Latin adiuxtāre, from Latin iuxta. The Middle English originally meant "to correct, remedy" in the late 14th century, and was reborrowed from Middle French in the early 17th century. According to another view on the etymology, the word was actually derived from Old French ajouster and then supposedly later influenced by folk etymology from Latin iustus; if so, it is a a doublet of adjute.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA