scrutinise

present singular third person scrutinises · participle present scrutinising · participle past scrutinised · past scrutinised · alternative scrutinize

1. UKtransitiveTo examine something with great care.

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

   2005, Plato, translated by Lesley Brown, Sophist, page 230b

   3 more examples

   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.

   2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847, archived from the original on 11 Mar 2023

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

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

   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.

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

2. UKtransitiveTo audit accounts etc in order to verify them.