Anchoring

noun, verb

noun, verb ·3 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The act or means by which something is anchored or made firm. countable, uncountable

    "Stripped of its temporal anchorings, what remains of Geddes's thinking was its inactual or anachronic idealism, which often isolated him from his contemporaries […]"

  2. 2
    The tendency of people to place subsequently refined answers to a given question close to the initially estimated answer, giving undue weight to the initial answer, such as adjusting an initial estimate of 20% to 30% when 90% would be more appropriate. countable, uncountable
Verb
  1. 1
    present participle and gerund of anchor form-of, gerund, participle, present

Synonyms

All synonyms
focalismfocalism

Example

More examples

"Stripped of its temporal anchorings, what remains of Geddes's thinking was its inactual or anachronic idealism, which often isolated him from his contemporaries […]"

Etymology

From anchor + -ing.

Related phrases

anchoring effect

More for "anchoring"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.