Other forms: gauges, gauging, gauged
To gauge something is to work out how much of it there is when nobody has told you. You gauge the heat of the bath with your elbow before the baby goes in, and you gauge the room before you tell the joke.
A gauge is also the instrument that does the measuring for you: the fuel gauge on the dashboard, the pressure gauge on a boiler, the rain gauge at the end of the garden. Engineers use the word for a fixed size rather than a reading — the gauge of a wire is its thickness, and the gauge of a railway is the distance between the two rails, which is why trains have to change at some borders. The verb almost always takes something you cannot simply read off a scale: you gauge the mood, gauge the reaction, gauge how much interest there is, and the sentence it appears in most is hard to gauge. Mind the spelling, with the a before the u, and keep it away from gouge, which means to dig out.
1verbgaugeTo judge or estimate the amount, level or strength of something, especially something you cannot measure directly.~10%
“It was hard to gauge how the audience felt from the back row.”
2nounshowsAn instrument that shows a level or a reading.~23%
“The fuel gauge had been sitting on empty for a mile.”
3nounrailA standard measurement of thickness or width — of wire, sheet metal, or the distance between railway rails.~65%
“The two lines were built to different gauges and could not share a train.”
4verbpreciselyTo measure something precisely with an instrument.~2%
“They gauge the depth of the snow at the same post every morning.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 177 sentences found in the wild and placed 151 of them on a sense (26 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: assess
GAUGE → a CAGE
A fat round dial, all glass and one red needle, is bolted to the front of a rabbit cage. Push a carrot through the bars and the needle climbs. Ten carrots, and it swings all the way round to FULL.
hooks ontocage
A gauge was a stick. The Old French gauge was a gauging rod, and behind it stood Frankish galgō, a measuring rod or pole. The Germanic word behind that, galgô, meant a pole, a stake, a cross-beam — and English took the same beam for gallows. Gauge and gallows are one piece of timber put to two very different uses.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰalgʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*galgô — pole, stake, cross
Frankish
*galgō — measuring rod, pole
Middle English
gauge
English, today
gauge
Built from
From Middle English gauge, gaugen, from Anglo-Norman -, fro-nor - gauger (compare Modern French jauger from Old French jaugier), from gauge (“gauging rod”), from Frankish galgō (“measuring rod, pole”), from Proto-Germanic galgô (“pole, stake, cross”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰalgʰ-, ǵʰalg- (“perch, long switch”). Cognate with Old High German galgo, Old Frisian galga, Old English ġealga (“cross-beam, gallows”), Old Norse galgi (“cross-beam, gallows”), Old Norse gelgja (“pole, perch”). a doublet of gallows.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA