Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To conclude from evidence or by reasoning.
  • intransitive verb To involve by logical necessity; entail.
  • intransitive verb To indicate indirectly; imply.
  • intransitive verb To draw inferences.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To bring in, on, or about; lead forward or advance; adduce.
  • To form as an opinion or belief in consequence of something else observed or believed; derive as a fact or consequence, by reasoning of any kind; accept from evidence or premises; conclude.
  • To bear presumption or proof of; imply.
  • To conclude; reach a conclusion by reasoning.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb obsolete To bring on; to induce; to occasion.
  • transitive verb obsolete To offer, as violence.
  • transitive verb obsolete To bring forward, or employ as an argument; to adduce; to allege; to offer.
  • transitive verb To derive by deduction or by induction; to conclude or surmise from facts or premises; to accept or derive, as a consequence, conclusion, or probability.
  • transitive verb obsolete To show; to manifest; to prove.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb obsolete To show; to manifest; to prove.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb draw from specific cases for more general cases
  • verb reason by deduction; establish by deduction
  • verb guess correctly; solve by guessing
  • verb conclude by reasoning; in logic
  • verb believe to be the case

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin īnferre, to bring in, adduce : in-, in; see in– + ferre, to bear; see bher- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin inferō.

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Examples

Comments

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  • i like words that seem to be snippets of longer, older words... not sure of why.

    November 16, 2008

  • There's a list of back-formations. I don't think that "infer" is an example of one, though.

    November 16, 2008

  • Infer a penny, infer a pound.

    February 4, 2013

  • Holmes does this a lot when he is working on cases.

    July 25, 2013