What's the difference between guess and hunch?

Guess


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To form an opinion concerning, without knowledge or means of knowledge; to judge of at random; to conjecture.
  • (v. t.) To judge or form an opinion of, from reasons that seem preponderating, but are not decisive.
  • (v. t.) To solve by a correct conjecture; to conjecture rightly; as, he who guesses the riddle shall have the ring; he has guessed my designs.
  • (v. t.) To hit upon or reproduce by memory.
  • (v. t.) To think; to suppose; to believe; to imagine; -- followed by an objective clause.
  • (v. i.) To make a guess or random judgment; to conjecture; -- with at, about, etc.
  • (n.) An opinion as to anything, formed without sufficient or decisive evidence or grounds; an attempt to hit upon the truth by a random judgment; a conjecture; a surmise.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) What's to become of Tibetan stability and cohesion then is anyone's guess.
  • (2) The Pan American Health Organization, the Americas arm of the World Health Organization, estimated the deaths from Tuesday's magnitude 7 quake at between 50,000 and 100,000, but said that was a "huge guess".
  • (3) I guess that’s my socialist principles,” says the older woman.
  • (4) Iowa (10pm ET) Real Clear Politics average: Obama +2.0pt 2008 result: Obama won by 9.4pt 2004 result: Bush won by 0.7pt Swing counties with 50k+ population: Polk (+5.1), Scott (+5.0), Woodbury (-10.0) This state is where the primary season begins, and it likes to keep Americans guessing.
  • (5) In the end, the emails from citizen scientists nailed the timing: “looks like it started maybe December 2015”; the severity: “I’ve seen dieback before, but not like this”; and the cause: “guessing it may be the consequence of the four-year drought”.
  • (6) The most serious attack is called offline password guessing.
  • (7) And Bristol, I guess, is following on because it has an ambition to become something similar.” According to Key, Bristol’s congestion problems are only as bad as those of other UK cities, and it’s “streets ahead” on walking and cycling .
  • (8) The New Economics Foundation guessed that it could be anywhere between 3.4 and 8.3p ; 8.3 pence was so far beyond what anyone else forecast that I treated it as scarcely credible.
  • (9) As you might have already guessed, I welcome the "rise of house prices".
  • (10) I guess it's all down to Miss Matthews, who taught me English when I was growing up in Dar es Salaam.
  • (11) Robben's penalty was so well placed that it sneaked in despite Casillas's guessing right and almost reaching his own post.
  • (12) We had a meeting of minds, I guess you’d say,” Whillock told the Guardian.
  • (13) No precise estimate was availabletoday, but the Tories on a first guess believe spending outside the protected areas will have to fall by 7% over the two years.
  • (14) David Lengel (@LengelDavid) #Cardinals fans on the road with predictions for G6 #WorldSeries guess who they like tonight?
  • (15) They have already forced government exporters to sell their dollars, and same will happen for banks I guess, so in a sense, capital controls are already in place,” said Sergei Guriev, an exiled economist who fled Russia after criticising the Kremlin.
  • (16) With their news and social media interest, they will be noting everything that follows their murderous assault on Paris, and my guess is that right now the chant among them will be “We are winning”.
  • (17) All these were produced by School 21’s pupils and he invites me to guess the age group; each time, I overestimate by at least two years.
  • (18) Instructing the subjects to guess or not to guess had an effect of intra-array, displacement, and extra-array errors.
  • (19) But on the strength of the effort expended on the right royal cover-up thus far, it seems a fair guess that officials and ministers will have given the prince’s letters rather more favourable attention than routine correspondence with a member of the public.
  • (20) Wang admitted basing his report “on hearsay and his own subjective guesses without conducting due verifications”, Xinhua added.

Hunch


Definition:

  • (n.) A hump; a protuberance.
  • (n.) A lump; a thick piece; as, a hunch of bread.
  • (n.) A push or thrust, as with the elbow.
  • (v. t.) To push or jostle with the elbow; to push or thrust suddenly.
  • (v. t.) To thrust out a hump or protuberance; to crook, as the back.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The police investigating the 1991 murder of the Oxford student Rachel McLean had a strong hunch that the killer was her boyfriend, John Tanner, another student.
  • (2) Global 'abnormality', hunching (rigid arching of back), hindlimb abduction, forepaw myoclonus, stereotyped lateral head movements, backing, and immobility occurred significantly only in drug-treated rats.
  • (3) We provide evidence that bicoid (bcd) and hunch-back (hb) gene products, as well as at least one other activator, are needed to activate Kr expression in the central domain.
  • (4) The fighters now look fat in winter combat jackets of as many different camouflage patterns as the origins of their units, hunched against a freezing wind that whips off the desert scrub.
  • (5) "It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea."
  • (6) Clinical signs in mice were squinting and distended testes in males, and in rats, rapid respiration (all doses), squinting, and hunching.
  • (7) At one point Serena hunched over and covered her face with her hands.
  • (8) "My hunch is that China is going to interpret this as war," he said.
  • (9) Last, and this is just a hunch as a career-long only-digital nerd: perhaps after more than a decade of digital influx, people are yearning a bit more for the physical, the tangible object, the easy-to-understand.
  • (10) "My hunch is that if this was a serious crisis we would see indications of it," she said.
  • (11) Analysis of official statistics by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc) at Manchester University backs up Martin's hunch: London and the south-east have come roaring out of the crash, and now account for a greater share of growth than they did even during the boom.
  • (12) Silent, head bowed, shoulders hunched in an ill-fitting suit, Oscar Pistorius would have attracted little attention from a casual observer unaware of his central role in the drama under way on Monday, in a nondescript ground floor courtroom in Pretoria.
  • (13) When they drive you from the detention centre to the courthouse, this is what happens: reveille even before the communal breakfast, stewing in your own sweat while hunched over in the "beaker" [a minuscule isolation cell for special prisoners inside the prisoner transport lorry], transport through the Moscow traffic jams – a minimum of two hours.
  • (14) The only real calculation is the division of 530,000 by anticipated audience size; if the pen-pushers have it right, their budget wins - and if I had to play a hunch, I'd say it probably will.
  • (15) If they do, my hunch is that it's because their intuitions haven't kept pace with the extent that mobile technology has pervaded our lives, or with the scale of the data that outfits such as the NSA have been accumulating.
  • (16) It would be nice if we could say this was because the media had learned their lessons and recognised the importance of scientific evidence, rather than one bloke's hunch.
  • (17) Griff is giggling so much he has to stand in the corner of the studio, hunched over in hysteria. '
  • (18) His magazine, launched last year on a hunch and a shoestring, covers music, but not just music - it will interview Matt Groening or Anthony Beevor or the creator of the iPod alongside rock stars chosen for their articulacy rather than their looks, such as Morrissey, Elvis Costello and Neil Tennant (who once worked with Hepworth and Ellen at Smash Hits).
  • (19) It means that his tactical hunches, l ike taking off Jasper Cillessen and putting Tim Krul in goal for the penalty shoot-out against Costa Rica , tend to come off.
  • (20) These things should be set out long before the government makes any decision, and certainly before any more senior ministers diminish themselves by making off-the-cuff assertions rooted in hunches or Labour party politics.