Other forms: evaluated, evaluating, evaluates
To evaluate something is to look at it closely and decide how good, how useful or how valuable it is. A teacher evaluates a stack of essays; a doctor evaluates a patient before choosing a treatment; you evaluate two flats before you sign anything.
Evaluate is the careful cousin of judge — it carries time, criteria and evidence with it, not a snap reaction. The noun is evaluation and the person doing it is an evaluator, and both live in reports, funding bids and school inspections. Maths and computing borrow the word for something drier: to evaluate an expression is to work out what number it comes to. You evaluate a plan, a risk, a drug trial, a piece of work — you would not say you evaluated your lunch. And it wants an object after it: you evaluate something.
1verbevaluateTo judge how good, useful or valuable something is after examining it carefully.
“The committee will evaluate every application before the deadline.”
2verbworkTo work out the numerical value of a mathematical expression.
“Evaluate the expression when x is equal to three.”
Also accepted in games: assess
Evaluate arrived backwards. The noun evaluation was in English first, and the verb was cut out of it — a back-formation, the same trick that gives edit from editor. Behind the whole family sits value, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root, *h₂welh₁-.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂welh₁-
English, today
evaluate
a back-formation from evaluation.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sharper Verbs, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 3 of A Man Called Ove.
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