Speculative means based on guesswork, or done in the hope of profit. Purely speculative, a speculative application, speculative building.
In finance it means bought for resale rather than for use, and speculative building is putting up houses before anybody has agreed to buy them. A speculative application is one sent where no job was advertised.
1adjectivespeculativeBased on guesswork, or done in the hope of profit.
“The report is purely speculative, since nobody has seen the actual figures yet.”
speculative is a quality.
Latin speculativus comes from speculari, to observe or spy out, from specere, to look.
Latin
speculativus
Old French
speculatif
Middle English
speculatyf
English, today
speculative
Middle English speculatyf, borrowed from Old French speculatif or directly from Latin speculativus, from Latin speculor.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA