qualify

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   make more specific

   qualify these remarks

2. 2
   verb

   To successfully fall under some category or description by meeting requisite conditions.

   Descartes's methodism with its regulative criterion leads him to explicitly deny that accidentally true belief qualifies as knowledge.

3. 3
   verb

   To make someone competent or eligible for some position or task.

   They usually spoke of this connection as a longing for the purer life of Attic civilization, but that was a delusion which even they recognized — the position of slaves and women hardly qualified Classical antiquity as an ideal of freedom.

4. 4
   verb

   To become competent or eligible for some position or task.

   He had qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession.

5. 5
   verb

   To modify, limit, restrict or moderate something; especially to add conditions or requirements for an assertion to be true.

   O! never say that I was false of heart, Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify

6. 6
   verb

   To mitigate, alleviate (something); to make less disagreeable.

   he balmes and herbes thereto applyde, / And euermore with mighty spels them charmd, / That in short space he has them qualifyde, / And him restor'd to health, that would haue algates dyde.

7. 7
   verb

   To give individual quality to; to modulate; to vary; to regulate.

   It hath no larynx […] to qualify the sound.

8. 8
   verb

   To throw and catch each object at least twice.

   to qualify seven balls you need at least fourteen catches

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French qualifier (“to qualify”). Equivalent to quality + -fy.