Other forms: qualified, qualifying, qualifies
To qualify is to reach the standard that lets you in. You qualify as a nurse after three years of training, a team qualifies for the final by winning on Saturday, and you qualify for the cheaper fare if you are over sixty.
The prepositions do different jobs. Qualify AS a doctor is about the training you finished; qualify FOR a place is about the right you have earned. It also runs the other way — a first-aid course qualifies you to treat a burn, so the course does something TO you. Then there is the quieter sense in writing and argument: to qualify a statement is to add a limit to it, turning 'everyone loved it' into 'almost everyone, on the night, loved it'. The nouns are qualification and qualifier, and the adjective qualified means both trained and limited: a qualified electrician, a qualified yes.
1verbgradeTo reach the standard or meet the conditions needed for something.~79%
“Only the top four teams qualify for the final.”
synonyms: make the grade
2verbcompleteTo complete the training and exams for a profession.~11%
“He hopes to qualify as an architect next year.”
3verbqualifyTo give someone the right or the skill to do something.~8%
“A weekend course does not qualify you to rewire a house.”
4verbtemperTo limit a statement by adding detail to it.~2%
“I should qualify that: it worked, but only on the small machine.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 26 sentences found in the wild and placed 26 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Qualify came from Middle French qualifier, and it is simply quality with -fy on the end — the same ending that builds simplify and purify. To qualify something was first to give it a quality, to say what kind of thing it was. Reaching a standard and adding a limit are both, underneath, ways of pinning down exactly which quality is meant.
Middle French
qualifier — to qualify
English, today
qualify
Middle French qualifier (“to qualify”). Equivalent to quality + -fy.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA