Recent Examples on the Web

The third narrative relegates the economic data to their proper place as an unreliable and heavily revised set of guesstimates. James Mackintosh, WSJ, "Pick Your Portfolio’s Story: Late-Cycle Sugar Rush or New Boom?," 30 July 2018

The Park Service stopped estimating crowd sizes after it was sued in 1995 by the organizers of the Million Man March, who claimed the march attracted more than four times the official guesstimate of 400,000. Rick Hampson, USA TODAY, "The six keys to organizing a successful march on Washington," 22 Mar. 2018

The document says there are no U.S. estimates of the feral hog population based on scientific data but guesstimates suggest a national population of 8 million to 9 million. W. Gardner Selby, San Antonio Express-News, "Publication half right about Texas being top spot for feral pigs," 23 Feb. 2018

But in February Harry Enten made a credible rough guesstimate: Since 2012 (or when most states instituted the current House district lines), Republicans have won, on average, 51 percent of the two-party House vote and 55 percent of House seats. Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, "Is That a Democratic Tsunami Taking Shape for 2018?," 14 May 2017

Savage derived it by combining a good-faith guesstimate by researcher and noted eccentric T.D. Luckey with a textbook’s reasonable, but unsupported human cell count. Michael Greshko, National Geographic, "How Many Cells Are in the Human Body—And How Many Microbes?," 13 Jan. 2016

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'guesstimate.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.