inference means the act or process of inferring by deduction or induction. It carries an Arena rating of 1470, earned across 77 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, inference ranks #1,381 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #1,812 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,063 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #5,559 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words.
inference is pronounced /ˈɪn.fə.ɹəns/.
Why “inference” is a great word
INFERENCE — [Noun] A conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning, or the process of drawing such a conclusion. From Medieval Latin inferentia, from Latin inferentem (nominative inferens), the present participle of inferre ("to bring in, deduce"). First attested in English in the 1590s. Unlike an "assumption," which is accepted without proof, or an "observation," which is a direct registration of fact, an inference is the deliberate architecture built upon that raw material. It is the detective conjuring a motive from a misplaced letter, the paleontologist envisioning a roaring world from the curve of a silent bone, or the lover detecting affection in a carefully averted gaze—the quiet, necessary art of constructing reality from its scattered clues. We live not by what is given, but by what we are compelled to deduce from the fragments.
Etymology
From Latin inferentia. Morphologically infer + -ence.
noun
- The act or process of inferring by deduction or induction.
- That which is inferred; a truth or proposition drawn from another which is admitted or supposed to be true; a conclusion; a deduction.
- Output generated by a trained machine learning model as it applies learned patterns to new data.
- An instance or example of this, such as a prediction, classification, decision, etc.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.