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Conjecturing—forming an idea or opinion with some amount of guesswork—usually involves more than simply throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, but that’s the gist, and with good etymological reason: conjecture comes ultimately from the Latin verb conicere, which means, literally, “to throw together.” To conjecture is to make an educated guess rather than a stab in the dark; it involves piecing together bits of information to come to a plausible conclusion, as in “scientists conjecturing about the cause of the disease.” As such, conjecture tends to show up in formal contexts rather than informal ones, though we reckon one could conjecture if their spaghetti is perfectly cooked based on the amount of time it has been boiling, and on what has worked in the past. (Nota bene: throwing it at the wall doesn’t work!)
Synonyms
Examples of conjecture in a Sentence
Carl Zimmer, Science, 11 May 2001
… their voices rose in a chorus of conjecture and alarm, repeating the selfsame remark: "What is she going to do? I mean, is Betty going to faint?"
—Edna O'Brien, New Yorker, 1 Jan. 1990
The reason why the French with superior man-power and American resources were doing so poorly was not beyond all conjecture.
—Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly, 1984
Peculiar features of early maps, which may have been nothing but a draftsman's whimsy, have inspired pages of vain conjecture.
—Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America, 1971
The biography includes conjectures about the writer's earliest ambitions.
a conjecture about the extent of the injury
Most of the book is conjecture, not fact.
Verb
It is fashionable now to conjecture that the Big Bang was caused by a random quantum fluctuation in a vacuum devoid of space and time.
—Martin Gardner, Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 1998
… their traces left for future archaeologists to rediscover and perhaps to wonder or conjecture over.
—Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, 1984
I am anxious to conjecture beforehand what may be expected from the sowing turneps [sic] in jaded ground, how much from the acre, & how large they will be?
—Thomas Jefferson, letter, 29 Dec. 1794
Some have conjectured that the distant planet could sustain life.
We only conjecture about his motives.
Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine, 5 Nov. 2024
What happened after that is conjecture mixed with logic and the findings of a United States Department of Justice investigation.
—Tracy Scott Forson, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Nov. 2024
Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, 29 Aug. 2024
Riemann conjectured that all the other zeros of the function, called nontrivial zeros, have a real part of 1/2, and so are located on this vertical line.
—Jordana Cepelewicz, WIRED, 4 Aug. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Conjecture.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conjecture. Accessed 28 Nov. 2024.
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conjecture
1 of 2 noun
conjecture
2 of 2 verb
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