Verb

To provide an acceptable explanation for.

How can you justify spending so much money on clothes?

Paying too much for car insurance is not justified .

To be a good, acceptable reason for; warrant.

Nothing can justify your rude behaviour last night.

* E. Everett

Unless the oppression is so extreme as to justify' revolution, it would not ' justify the evil of breaking up a government.

To arrange (text) on a page or a computer screen such that the left and right ends of all lines within paragraphs are aligned.

The text will look better justified .

To absolve, and declare to be free of blame or sin

* Shakespeare

I cannot justify whom the law condemns.

* Bible, Acts xiii. 39

By him all that believe are justified' from all things, from which ye could not be ' justified by the law of Moses.

To prove; to ratify; to confirm.

(Shakespeare)

Verb

(en verb)

To modify.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= A new prescription , passage=As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.}}

To improve or rectify.

* {{quote-magazine, title=Towards the end of poverty

, date=2013-06-01, volume=407, issue=8838, page=11, magazine=(The Economist) citation , passage=But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.}}

To settle an insurance claim.

To change to fit circumstances.