Other forms: critiques, critiqued, critiquing
A critique is a worked-out judgement of something — what it does well, where it fails, and why. The two typed pages your tutor staples to the essay, the hour an architect spends going through a colleague's drawings.
It is not the same as criticism, and the difference is worth holding on to: criticism can be a complaint thrown over a shoulder, while a critique is built, balanced and expected to be fair, so a critique can be entirely positive. It works as a verb — students critique each other's drawings on Friday afternoons — and it takes of: a critique of the plan, a critique of the government's figures. In art and design schools it is the name for the session itself, where the work goes up on the wall and everybody says what they think. Say it kri-TEEK, with the weight at the end; the French ending never came off. The word stays formal — you critique a thesis, you do not critique your friend's haircut.
1nouncritiqueA detailed, reasoned judgement of a piece of work, an idea or a policy.~88%
“Her critique of the proposal ran to twelve pages.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
synonyms: review, assessment, appraisal
2verbsetTo go through something and set out its strengths and its faults.~10%
“Students critique each other's drawings every Friday.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
3nounartIn art and design schools, a session where work is put up and discussed.~2%
“The final critique lasted all afternoon.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 127 sentences found in the wild and placed 121 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
critique is a reasoned judgement.
cri-TIQUE → an an-TIQUE
An antique clock stands on the table under a hot lamp while a woman turns it over in her hands — the wood, the crack at the back, the bell that still works. A man beside her writes down every word she says, and it runs to three pages.
hooks ontoantique
Critique is critic with a different ending on it. New Latin critica came from Latin criticus, critical, and English borrowed it separately for the long, considered, written kind of judging — keeping the foreign spelling, and with it the stress at the end: kri-TEEK, nothing like critic.
Proto-Indo-European
*krey-
New Latin
critica — critique
French
critique
English, today
critique
Built from
French critique, from New Latin critica (“critique”), feminine of criticus (“critical”); see critic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA