A magistrate is someone who sits as a judge in a local court and deals with smaller crimes — fighting in the street, driving too fast, taking something not worth a lot of money. In Britain, many magistrates are not full lawyers. They are often ordinary people from the town who get training and sit in court a few days a month. They can make someone pay a fine, send them to prison for a short time, or let them go with a warning. A much more serious crime, such as murder, goes to a higher court and a different kind of judge. The tidy picture is “local judge for small cases,” and that is fair — though actually the job is not the same everywhere. In the United States a magistrate judge is a real federal judge who handles some of the smaller pieces of a bigger case. The word feels official. You meet it in news about courts, not at the dinner table. People sometimes say “the magistrates” to mean that local court as a whole.