William ShakespeareH. R. ChellmanJohn Dewey
Infer vs. Imply: Usage Guide
Sir Thomas More is the first writer known to have used both infer and imply in their approved senses in 1528 (with infer meaning "to deduce from facts" and imply meaning "to hint at"). He is also the first to have used infer in a sense close in meaning to imply (1533). Both of these uses of infer coexisted without comment until some time around the end of World War I. Since then, the "indicate" and "hint or suggest" meanings of infer have been frequently condemned as an undesirable blurring of a useful distinction. The actual blurring has been done by the commentators. The "indicate" sense of infer, descended from More's use of 1533, does not occur with a personal subject. When objections arose, they were to a use with a personal subject (which is now considered a use of the "suggest, hint" sense of infer). Since dictionaries did not recognize this use specifically, the objectors assumed that the "indicate" sense was the one they found illogical, even though it had been in respectable use for four centuries. The actual usage condemned was a spoken one never used in logical discourse. At present the condemned "suggest, hint" sense is found in print chiefly in letters to the editor and other informal prose, not in serious intellectual writing. The controversy over the "suggest, hint" sense has apparently reduced the frequency with which the "indicate" sense of infer is used.
Examples of infer in a Sentence
V. Louise Higgins, "Approaching Usage in the Classroom,"
English Journal, March 1960
… I infer that Swinburne found an adequate outlet for the creative impulse in his poetry …
—T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 1920
Lucy … reseated herself with an alacrity and cheerfulness which seemed to infer that she could taste no greater delight …
—Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811
It's difficult to infer how these changes will affect ordinary citizens.
Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
The reader might infer that Harold doesn’t really need the validation of his peers, and should instead hold his ground.
—Jeremy Gordon, The Atlantic, 12 Sep. 2025
Secret undersea freshwater aquifers This year’s offshore drilling campaign off New England didn’t just infer freshwater under the Atlantic seafloor.
—Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 11 Sep. 2025
Instead, deaf viewers see unsynchronized plain white text on a black background and it is left to their imagination to infer those rich and nuanced character tomes essential for storytelling that hearing audiences take for granted.
—Gus Alexiou, Forbes.com, 11 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for infer
Cite this Entry
“Infer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infer. Accessed 19 Sep. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
Legal Definition
infer
verb
Share