likelihood

UK/ˈlaɪklihʊd/US/ˈlaɪklihʊd/

nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,832 of 15,258leans written

Likelihood is how probable something is. The chance of it actually happening.

It is a slightly more formal way of saying chance, and it keeps the company of risk assessments and forecasts: the likelihood of rain, the likelihood of a recession. The phrase in all likelihood means almost certainly, and it is the commonest place the word appears at all. Statistics gives likelihood a precise technical meaning distinct from probability, though everyday English treats the two as the same. The adjective likely is far commoner than the noun.

Definitions of likelihood

1nounlikelihoodThe chance that something will happen.C1
“There is little likelihood of a change now.”

Phrases it lives in

in all likelihood — almost certainly, hedged the way a report hedges

Where it comes from

Middle English
liklihode
English, today
likelihood

From Middle English liklihode, equivalent to likely + -hood.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building

First appears in chapter 23 of A Man Called Ove.

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likelihood in the wild

A likelihood function (often simply called the likelihood) gives the relative merit of various statistical models for describing a data set.
Likelihood function
Thus the likelihood-ratio test tests whether this ratio is significantly different from one, or equivalently whether its natural logarithm is significantly different from zero.
Likelihood-ratio test
The Bayes factor can be thought of as a Bayesian analog to the likelihood-ratio test, although it uses the integrated (i.e., marginal) likelihood rather than the maximized likelihood.
Bayes factor
In statistics, the monotone likelihood ratio property is a property of the ratio of two probability density functions (PDFs).
Monotone likelihood ratio
Important examples of estimating equations are the likelihood equations.
Estimating equations

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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