Guesswork

noun

noun ·2 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An estimate, judgment or opinion made by guessing, from limited information. countable, uncountable

    "By a careful study of the figure we might suspect that when the rectangle becomes a square its area would be the greatest, but this would at best be mere guesswork. A better way would evidently be to plot the graph of the function (1) and note its behavior."

  2. 2
    an estimate based on little or no information wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
actuarial predictionapocalypseassumptionaxiomconjectureconjecture

Example

More examples

"I used guesswork for all my answers on this test and they were all correct."

Etymology

From guess + work. Compare Dutch giswerk (“guesswork”).

Related phrases

dead reckoning

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