from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. Inference or judgment based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork.
- n. A statement, opinion, or conclusion based on guesswork: The commentators made various conjectures about the outcome of the next election.
- transitive v. To infer from inconclusive evidence; guess.
- intransitive v. To make a conjecture.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A statement or an idea which is unproven, but is thought to be true; a guess.
- n. A supposition based upon incomplete evidence; a hypothesis.
- n. A statement likely to be true based on available evidence, but which has not been formally proven.
- n. Interpretation of signs and omens.
- v. To guess; to venture an unproven idea.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. An opinion, or judgment, formed on defective or presumptive evidence; probable inference; surmise; guess; suspicion.
- intransitive v. To make conjectures; to surmise; to guess; to infer; to form an opinion; to imagine.
- transitive v. To arrive at by conjecture; to infer on slight evidence; to surmise; to guess; to form, at random, opinions concerning.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To form (an opinion or notion) upon probabilities or upon slight evidence; guess: generally governing a clause.
- Synonyms Imagine, Conjecture, Surmise, Guess, Presume, fancy, divine. Imagine literally expresses pure speculation, and figuratively expresses an idea founded upon the slightest evidence: as, I imagine that you will find yourself mistaken. Conjecture is something like a random throw of the mind; it turns from one possibility to another, and perhaps selects one, almost arbitrarily. Surmise has often the same sense as conjecture; it sometimes implies a suspicion, favorable or otherwise: as, I surmise that his motives were not good. Guess suggests a riddle, the solution of which is felt after by the mind—a question, as to which we offer an opinion, but not with confidence, because the material for a judgment is confessedly insufficient. To presume is to base a tentative or provisional opinion on such knowledge as one has, to be held until it is modified or overthrown by further information.
- To form conjectures; surmise; guess.
- n. The act of forming an opinion without definite proof; a supposition made to account for an ascertained state of things, but as yet unverified; an opinion formed on insufficient presumptive evidence; a surmise; a guess.
- n. Suspicious surmise; derogatory supposition or presumption.
- n. Synonyms Supposition, hypothesis, theory.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- v. to believe especially on uncertain or tentative grounds
- n. reasoning that involves the formation of conclusions from incomplete evidence
- n. a hypothesis that has been formed by speculating or conjecturing (usually with little hard evidence)
- n. a message expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence
The word conjecture was all over it: it was full of disclaimers and hedgings, and it raised the hair on the back of his neck, regardless.
Such conjecture is not only legitimate; it's necessary and urgent.
For some time I was lost in conjecture as to the cause of this; but yesterday an idea struck me, and if it is well founded, I conjure you to avow it.
The only effect I can conjecture is an increase in the woes of the unfortunates who must bow to this petty tyranny for'ard.
Yet the whole itself must remain conjecture, as imponderable as accomplished facts or as forecasts of the future.
To those, yes, American democrats who quibble, cavil, and lose themselves in conjecture over the risks to which the judge who allows a criminal to live subjects honest people, we countered with Maïmonides's axiom: "It is more satisfying to acquit thousands of the guilty than to execute one sole innocent man."
More specifiÂ cally, its key conjecture is that the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype can create an anxiety that disrupts cognitive performance and influences outcomes and behaviors
A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period.
Formulated in 1904 by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, the conjecture is fundamental to achieving an understanding of three-dimensional shapes (compact manifolds).
The Poincaré conjecture is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems established by CMI in 2000.