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overestimate

UK/ˌəʊvəɹˈɛstɪmeɪt/<q:verb>US/ˌəʊvəɹˈɛstɪmeɪt/<q:verb>
verbB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,927 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: overestimated, overestimating, overestimates

To overestimate is to think something bigger or better than it is. Overestimate the cost, badly overestimated, overestimate his ability.

The commonest single error in planning is the opposite — people underestimate how long things take, which is the planning fallacy — and overestimating is rarer and safer. It cannot be overestimated means it is extremely important, and that phrase is misused constantly.

Definitions of overestimate

  1. 1verboverestimateTo think something bigger or better than it is.B2+

    “I overestimated how much food we'd need, so there were lots of leftovers.”

overestimate is a misjudging.

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    aestimātus — valuing, estimate

  2. Middle English

    estimat

  3. English

    estimate

  4. English, today

    overestimate

From over- + estimate. estimate comes from Middle English estimat, Latin aestimātus (“valuing, estimate”), from aestimō + -tus.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Word Building

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overestimate in the wild

  • Novice programmers often vastly overestimate how useful this is.

    UTF-32

  • Optimism bias is the tendency of an individual to overestimate the likelihood of positive events and underestimate that of negative events.

    Optimism bias

  • Generally, the optimism bias is stronger for underestimating negative events than overestimating positive events.

    Optimism bias

  • People often overestimate or underestimate the length of the bisecting line relative to the bisected line of the same length.

    Vertical–horizontal illusion

  • Restraint bias is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control impulsive behavior.

    Restraint bias

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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.

Related words

the aestimātus family

underestimateestimate

overestimate — used about once every 7,462 pages · #10,927 · point at the bar for the others

  • estimation