Other forms: inferred, inferring, infers
To infer is to work something out that nobody actually said — you take the facts in front of you and draw the conclusion yourself. Muddy boots by the door and a dripping coat: you infer that it has been raining.
You infer something FROM evidence: from her tone I inferred that she was not happy. The noun is inference, and in science and statistics inference is the formal name for reasoning from data to a conclusion. Now the mistake almost everyone makes. Imply and infer are the two ends of one act: the speaker implies, the listener infers. So "are you inferring that I lied?" is backwards — the word wanted there is implying.
1verbinferTo reach a conclusion from evidence and reasoning rather than from being told directly.~98%
“From the empty car park we inferred that the shop had closed.”
2verbderiveTo derive a conclusion from stated premises, in logic or statistics.~2%
“From those two statements you can infer a third.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: deduce, conclude
Infer comes from Latin infero, which is in-, into, joined to fero, to carry. To infer is to carry a conclusion in from what you were given. That fero traces back to the same Proto-Indo-European root as English bear, so infer and bear are distant cousins.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰer-
Latin
inferō
English, today
infer
From Latin inferō, from Latin in- (“in, at, on; into”) + Latin ferō (“bear, carry; suffer”) (cognate to Old English beran, whence English bear), from Proto-Italic ferō, from Proto-Indo-European bʰéreti (“to bear, carry”), from the root bʰer-. Literally “carry forward”, equivalent to “bear in”, as in concluding from a premise. a doublet of inbear.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA