judgement

There’s a whole courtroom hiding inside this word. A Roman judge was a walking compound: ius, meaning law or right, joined forces with dicere, “to say,” so to judge was literally to speak the law aloud. That family gave us juger in Old French and then English judge, while the noun ended up wearing the tidy little suffix -ment like a legal robe. The same root family still turns up in words such as judicial, adjudicate, and even prejudice, where a judgment gets made before the evidence has had its say. So every time someone asks for good judgment, they’re really asking for a mind that can stand up in court, hear the facts, and not blurt out the verdict too early.