Other forms: inferences
An inference is a conclusion you reach yourself, from evidence, without anybody stating it. Wet umbrellas by the door, and the inference is that it is raining outside. A detective looking at the mud on someone's shoes is making an inference.
The word takes from and about: an inference from the data, an inference about what the writer believes. You draw an inference rather than make one, and the plural runs through exam questions, as in what inferences can you draw from the graph. Inference is also the name of the process itself, the step from evidence to conclusion, which is why logic books talk about rules of inference. The trap is the verb pair behind it: a speaker implies, a listener infers. If you say she inferred that I was lazy, you mean she concluded it, not that she hinted at it.
1nouninferenceA conclusion reached from evidence rather than from a direct statement.~24%
“The inference was that the money had gone missing months earlier.”
synonyms: conclusion, deduction
2nounprocessThe process of reasoning from evidence to a conclusion.~76%
“The whole chapter deals with the rules of inference.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
inference is a form of reasoning.
Inference comes from Latin inferentia. English took the verb infer first and then hung the ending -ence on it, the same move that turns prefer into preference and refer into reference.
Latin
inferentia
English, today
inference
From Latin inferentia. Morphologically infer + ence.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA