scrutinise

English

Alternative forms

• scrutinize

Etymology

From scrutiny + -ise.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈskɹuːtɪnaɪz/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Verb

scrutinise (third-person singular simple present scrutinises, present participle scrutinising, simple past and past participle scrutinised) (British spelling)

1. (transitive) To examine something with great care.
   • 2005, Plato, translated by Lesley Brown, Sophist, page 230b:

     Because his opinions are all over the place, they find it easy to scrutinise them and lay them out;

   • 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist‎^[1], volume 408, number 8847, archived from the original on 11 March 2023:

     Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

   • 2020 June 3, Lilian Greenwood talks to Paul Stephen, “Rail's 'underlying challenges' remain”, in RAIL, page 31:

     But few MPs could claim to have followed and scrutinised Government transport policy to the extent that she has over the past decade.

   • 2022 August 10, Mel Holley, “Network News: Question marks over TransPennine upgrade spending”, in RAIL, number 963, page 24:

     Independent of government and the civil service, the NAO [National Audit Office] scrutinises public spending for Parliament and helps it to hold government to account.

2. (transitive) To audit accounts etc in order to verify them.

Translations

scrutinize — see scrutinize

Anagrams

• scrutinies, sinecurist