A standard by which a judgment or decision is made.

One person's principal criterion for a new car may be its gas mileage, while someone else's may be whether it has room for four children. When filling a job opening, employers usually look for several criteria (notice the plural form) in the applicants; and when college admissions officers are reading student applications, they likewise always keep a few basic criteria in mind. And when interviewing an applicant, one criterion for both the employer and the admissions officer might include the size of the applicant's vocabulary!

A judgment or evaluation, especially a rating or discussion of merits and faults.

Even though *criticize* means to judge something negatively, a critique can be completely positive—or completely negative. Usually it's somewhere in between. When a paper of yours receives a critique from a teacher, you should read it carefully, and then reread it; getting mad or offended is the worst way to react. *Critique* is often a verb as well. Thus, writers and artists often form groups solely to critique each other's work, and scientific articles frequently get critiqued in letters to the editor in the following issue of the journal.

Overly critical.

The important prefix *hyper-* means “excessive” or “beyond”, so *hypercritical* means basically “too fussy.” In TV and film comedies, the mother-in-law is just about always hypercritical, since the person her child married is never good enough for her. But other parents, spouses, and even children can be just as bad, so we should all be careful. If your father asks what you think of his new experimental meatloaf and you say it needs a pinch of oregano, you're being constructive; if you say he should cut down on the sawdust next time, you're probably being hypercritical.

The ratio of the volume of red blood cells to whole blood.

Our blood is mostly made up of four components: plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and colorless blood cells called platelets. An instrument called a hematocrit (because it “judges” the blood) is used to separate a sample of blood into its components. The normal hematocrit for men is about 48%, for women about 38%. An abnormal proportion of red blood cells, either too many or too few, is a good early indicator of many diseases. So when you give blood as part of a physical exam, your hematocrit is one of the findings your doctor will often check.

(1) A system of law. (2) The study and philosophy of law.

Jurisprudence as a study may have begun in the Roman empire, where schools of law were first established. And Roman jurisprudence, like so many other things the Romans created, served as the model in later centuries throughout the Western world. And like many other legal words, *jurisprudence* is used only in formal writing.

To reject formally.

From its Latin roots, *abjure* would mean literally “to swear away.” Thus, after the holidays many people abjure all sweets and fattening foods, often making their vow in front of friends or relatives. *Abjure* is often confused with *adjure,* which means “to command solemnly, as if under oath.” Thus, a judge might adjure a criminal to change his ways; but it's up to the criminal to abjure a life of crime.

The crime of telling a lie under oath.

The prefix *per-* in Latin often meant “harmfully.” So witnesses who *perjure* themselves do harm to the truth by knowingly telling a lie. Not all lying is perjury, only lying under oath; so perjury generally takes place either in court or before a legislative body such as Congress. To avoid committing perjury, a witness or defendant may “take the Fifth”: that is, refuse to answer a question because the answer might be an admission of guilt, and the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution forbids forcing a citizen to admit to being guilty of a crime.

Based on or according to the law.

Coming straight from Latin, *de jure* is a term used mostly, but not always, in legal writing. Sometimes it's not enough to have something written into law; if a law isn't enforced, it might as well not exist. And if ordinary citizens are too scared of what would happen to them if they exercised their rights, then they don't really have those rights at all. Unfortunately, many countries have constitutions and laws that sound good but turn out not to have much effect. So *de jure* is almost always used in contrast to something else; its opposite is *de facto* (see de facto).