guesswork

• guess-work

From guess +‎ work. Compare Dutch giswerk (“guesswork”).

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guesswork (countable and uncountable, plural guessworks)

1. An estimate, judgment or opinion made by guessing, from limited information.
   • 1911, William Anthony Granville, Elements of the Differential and Integral Calculus:

     By a careful study of the figure we might suspect that when the rectangle becomes a square its area would be the greatest, but this would at best be mere guesswork. A better way would evidently be to plot the graph of the function (1) and note its behavior.

• guesstimate

• dead reckoning