Surmise

//sɜːˈmaɪz// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Thought, imagination, or conjecture, which may be based upon feeble or scanty evidence; suspicion; guess. countable, uncountable

    "surmises of jealousy or of envy"

  2. 2
    a message expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence wordnet
  3. 3
    Reflection; thought; posit. countable, uncountable

    "My Thought, whoſe Murther yet is but fantaſticall, / Shakes ſo my ſingle ſtate of Man, / That Function is ſmother'd in ſurmiſe, / And nothing is, but what is not."

Verb
  1. 1
    To imagine or suspect; to conjecture; to posit with contestable premises. intransitive

    "If, as I surmise, you see the ladies this evening, you might mention my intended visit."

  2. 2
    infer from incomplete evidence wordnet
  3. 3
    imagine to be the case or true or probable wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
conjectureconjectureguessguesshypothesisspeculation

Example

More examples

"The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis."

Etymology

From Old French surmis, past participle of surmetre, surmettre (“to accuse”), from sur- (“upon”) + metre (“to put”).

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