by one's lights
by one's lights prepositional phrase: according to one's understanding.
Prepositional phrase
- According to one's understanding.
- Once you allow yourself and you open the door to letting outside pressures of any kind influence or dictate — especially dictate — your decisions, then it’s over. Therein lies madness. Because my oath requires fidelity to the Constitution and to decide these cases by my best lights.2025 October 16, Ross Douthat, quoting Amy Coney Barrett, “Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC...
Synonyms of by one's lights
Origin of by one's lights
Chiefly by the metaphor of lights as sources of illumination (e.g., lamps, lanterns, candles, torches) (thus, how something looks depends on the quality and quantity of the available light), but the sense of light as sightedness or vision is cognitively adjacent, setting up an interpretation of lights as referring to the eyes themselves (compare in my view); the potentially variable figurativeness behind punch someone's lights out is comparable here.
Questions about by one's lights
- What does by one's lights mean?
- By one's lights means according to one's understanding.
- What part of speech is by one's lights?
- By one's lights is a prepositional phrase.
Words near by one's lights in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: by one's lights (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-by one's lights.ogg.
Cite this entry: “by one's lights.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by_one%27s_lights. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.