Other forms: guessed, guessing, guesses
To guess is to give an answer without knowing for sure. Guess the answer, take a guess, your guess is as good as mine.
The noun is what you say — a good guess, a wild guess, an educated guess, meaning one informed by something. In American English I guess is a very common softener meaning I suppose. Guess what is how English speakers announce news. Note guesswork, meaning reasoning based on guesses; second-guess, meaning to question a decision after the fact; and that guesstimate is a jokey blend of guess and estimate.
1verbguessTo give an answer without knowing for sure.~88%
“Nobody guessed it and the answer was obvious afterwards.”
2noungivenAn answer given without certainty.~12%
“It was a wild guess and it was right.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
guess is an uncertain answer.
Middle English gessen probably came from Scandinavian, related to a verb meaning to consider or aim at. Its family is unclear, which is fitting: the word for uncertainty has an uncertain origin.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰed-
Middle English
gessen
English, today
guess
Built from
From Middle English gessen and Middle English gesse, probably of gmq - origin, from gmq-oda getse, gitse, getsa (“to guess”), from Old Norse getsa, gitsa, from Proto-Germanic gitisōną (“to guess”), from Proto-Germanic getaną (“to get”), from Proto-Indo-European gʰed- (“to take, seize”). Cognate with Danish gisne (“to guess”), Norwegian gissa, gjette (“to guess”), Swedish gissa (“to guess”), stq gisje (“to guess”), Dutch gissen (“to guess”), Low German gissen (“to guess”), Dutch gis (“a guess”). Related also to Icelandic giska "to guess"; from Proto-Germanic gitiskōną. Compare also Russian гада́ть (“to conjecture, guess, divine”), Albanian gjëzë (“riddle”) from gjej (“find, recover, obtain”). More at get.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA