Retrodict

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To attempt to estimate the previous state from the present.

    "Many are impressed by the fact that climate models can "retrodict" climatic change—that is, use past climatic data (say, from the 1860s) to predict climatic data from the less-distant past (say, from the 1920s). They should not be."

Example

More examples

"Many are impressed by the fact that climate models can "retrodict" climatic change—that is, use past climatic data (say, from the 1860s) to predict climatic data from the less-distant past (say, from the 1920s). They should not be."

Etymology

From retro- + predict.

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