1 (often in compounds) an instrument for measuring the amount or level of sth:
a fuel / petrol / temperature gauge
2 a measurement of the width or thickness of sth:
What gauge of wire do we need?
3 (also bore especially in BrE) a measurement of the width of the BARREL of a gun:
a 12-gauge shotgun
4 the distance between the rails of a railway/railroad track or the wheels of a train:
standard gauge (= 56ス inches in Britain) * a narrow gauge (= narrower than standard) railway / train
5 [usuallysing.] ~ (of sth) (written) a fact or an event that can be used to estimate or judge sth:
Tomorrow's game against Arsenal will be a good gauge of their promotion chances.
Part of speech: verb
1 to make a judgement about sth, especially people's feelings or attitudes:
[VN] They interviewed employees to gauge their reaction to the changes. * He tried to gauge her mood. * [Vwh-] It was difficult to gauge whether she was angry or not.
2 [VN] to measure sth accurately using a special instrument:
precision instruments that can gauge the diameter to a fraction of a millimetre
3 to calculate sth approximately:
[VN] We were able to gauge the strength of the wind from the movement of the trees. * It is impossible to gauge the extent of the damage. [also Vwh-]
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for gauge is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is gauge a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, gauge is tagged as noun.
Does gauge appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — gauge appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.