crit

The root crit comes from the Greek verb krinein, which originally meant something very physical: "to separate" — to sift grain from chaff, to pick out one thing from a pile. From this act of separating grew the idea of discerning, and from discerning grew judging: to separate the good from the bad, the true from the false. A person skilled at this separating was a kritēs — a judge.

From krinein English inherited a whole family centered on judgment:

- critic — a kritēs, one who judges. Originally any judge of quality; today especially someone who reviews art, books, or film.
- criticize — to do what a critic does: weigh the merits and faults of something. The word leans negative in everyday use (point out faults), but its root sense is neutral evaluation.
- criticism — the act or result of judging.
- critical — this is where the family branches in two directions. From "judging" comes the sense "inclined to find fault" (a critical remark) and "involving careful judgment" (critical thinking). But critical also picked up a second life from crisis (see below), giving us "at a turning point, decisive" — a critical moment, a patient in critical condition.
- criterion / criteria — a kritērion was literally "a means for judging," a standard you measure things against. Criteria is simply its Greek plural — and in modern English the plural is far more common than the singular.
- critique — borrowed later through French, a formal, written act of judgment: a detailed evaluation rather than mere fault-finding.

Two members stray further from the obvious meaning:

- crisis comes from Greek krisis, "a decision, a turning point." A krisis was the decisive moment when a judgment had to be made — in medicine, the point in an illness where the patient would turn toward recovery or death. From "the moment of decision" English narrowed it to "a moment of acute danger or difficulty." The judging sense is still buried inside: a crisis is when everything hangs on what you decide.
- hypocrisy is the family's biggest surprise. It joins hypo- ("under") to krinein. In ancient Greece a hypokritēs was an actor — someone who answered and "judged" from under a stage mask, playing a part that was not himself. From "one who performs behind a mask" the word slid into its modern meaning: a person who pretends to virtues or beliefs he does not really hold. So hypocrisy literally means acting a role under a mask.

The thread running through the whole family is the act of separating in order to judge: critics judge quality, criteria are the rulers we judge by, a crisis is the moment judgment is forced on us, and a hypocrite is someone whose public judgment is a mask over a different private truth.