prediction
Pluralpredictions
- 1A statement saying what someone believes will happen in the future.
The economist's prediction about rising prices proved accurate within months.
Several predictions of the storm's path differed by hundreds of miles.
Similarforecast, prognosis, prognostication, prevision
Note
English took this word from Latin praedictiō, and it has a more bookish ring than its native equivalents: foretelling, foretale, forespeaking. In everyday use a prediction is something you make or offer up, often a prediction about something. It is judged afterward, so it is naturally called correct or incorrect. The Latin-derived prognostication sits at the grander end of the same family.
- 2An estimate of how likely an outcome is, calculated using statistical methods.
The model's prediction assigned an 80 percent probability to the patient's recovery.
Analysts compared the algorithm's predictions against the outcomes that actually occurred.
Similarestimate, forecast, projection
Note
Statistics gives the word a narrower job: here a prediction comes with its uncertainty attached and is not a promise. A model that predicts rain is judged by how often such outcomes occur across many cases, not by one wet day. Statisticians often report a prediction interval alongside the single best estimate. That interval is a range expected to contain a future observation, which sets this apart from the everyday statement about the future.
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Origin
A learned borrowing from Latin "praedictiō" (stem "praedictiōnis"), equivalent to "predict" plus the suffix "-ion".