What's the difference between guess and surmise?

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.

Surmise


Definition:

  • (n.) A thought, imagination, or conjecture, which is based upon feeble or scanty evidence; suspicion; guess; as, the surmisses of jealousy or of envy.
  • (n.) Reflection; thought.
  • (v. t.) To imagine without certain knowledge; to infer on slight grounds; to suppose, conjecture, or suspect; to guess.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Taken together, the mutational data allow a functional map of the recognition surface to be constructed and the physical nature of some of the specific interactions that stabilize the antibody-antigen complex to be surmised.
  • (2) Thus, BMIPP is surmised to be able to depict fatty acid metabolism in in vivo myocardial imaging.
  • (3) We surmise that reduction in pulmonary artery perfusion which occurs in pulmonary embolic disease alters the integrity of the alveolar (and possibly bronchiolar) epithelium.
  • (4) We have concluded that renal injuries should be classified by type and extent rather than by etiology, that the extent of injury should be determined and not surmised, and that the management of renal trauma is a function of the extent of injury and the over-all status of the patient.
  • (5) Thus, it is surmised that swine cells are more suitable than rat cells concerning insulin receptor binding and action studies.
  • (6) It was, therefore, surmised that both hypertension and hyperlipidemia would be two of the important factors in inducing the lesions in the cerebral arteries, but although such factors would be coordinative, hypertension might be more important in the process of damaging the cerebral arteries and leading to their degenerative changes.
  • (7) Although these bodies are not viral elements, it is surmised that they may be virus associated and consequently possibly related to the etiology of this tumor.
  • (8) However, the results for TP indicated that prior aquation was not required for protein binding, and we could surmise that binding of TP to protein proceeds via a direct nucleophilic attack.
  • (9) Royles also had to endure more or less the entire committee laughing at him openly when he boasted about consultants' high levels of job satisfaction, something the chuckling Mps surmised might be caused by their stellar pay.
  • (10) Inasmuch as both isoproterenol and prostaglandin E1 increase cyclic AMP content, one can surmise that cyclic AMP is involved in the stimulation of NGF mRNA accumulation.
  • (11) Since drug elimination is intimately associated with physiologic properties that are well described among species, it seems reasonable to surmise that drug elimination can be scaled among mammals.
  • (12) It may be surmised that the approach is based on a sort of "attitude" incorporated in the given score and defining the hearing aid satsifaction.
  • (13) The authorities surmised that the victims were passengers on long-distance buses hijacked by the Zetas, and the people aboard press-ganged as part of a recruitment drive.
  • (14) It may be surmised that a single CLL cell had been infected by EBV in vivo and established itself subsequently as a subclone within the CLL population.
  • (15) Based on these data, it was surmised that sex hormones may affect the growth of the tumor in this case.
  • (16) Ifop’s director, Jérôme Fourquet, surmised that “the French do not only adhere to the rhetoric of ‘war’ – [prime minister] Manuel Valls talked about ‘war’ last January – but also to decisions that entail a restriction of public liberty”.
  • (17) It is surmised that the easier delocalization of the positive charge in the deuterated alkyl diazonium ion causes a diminished reactivity and therefore influences the type and amount of DNA alkylation.
  • (18) The protective effect of the monoclonal antibodies is surmised being caused by agglutination of the trophozoites.
  • (19) The authors surmise that the less advantageous variant of individual peripheral thermoregulation (i.e.
  • (20) It is surmised that the time of persistence of sperms in the cervix may be related to coitus in the second week after the end of the menstrual period.