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The term is a noun of action from the past participle stem of examinare "to try by weight, weigh; to ponder".
Examinatio may lead to many different situations closely related to the type of tradition under inspection. "In a completely closed tradition it is theoretically feasible to reconstruct the archetype with such certainty that only a single form of the text without variants remains to be examined. In practice this is extremely unlikely to be the situation. Usually the critic is faced with pairs (sometimes triplets) of variants, all with a presumptive claim to be considered authoritative" (Kenney 1978, 191).
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