[In the non-thesaurus series, I create lists of viable alternatives to non-words (i.e. words that sound like real words, and may even have clear meanings, but that aren’t, in fact, words) that I sometimes find myself wanting to use.]
The word of the day is: surmision, i.e. the noun version of the verb “to surmise”. Because what one creates when one concludes is a conclusion, in my head, what one creates when one surmises is a surmision. But it’s not a really word, so what are the alternatives? Here goes:
- assumption
- belief
- conjecture
- guess
- hypothesis
- inference
- postulation
- premise
- reckoning
- speculation
- supposition
- theory
