It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 7th.
Today's word is conjecture, spelled C-O-N-J-E-C-T-U-R-E.
Conjecture is a verb.
It's a formal synonym of the verb guess that means to form an opinion or idea without proof or sufficient evidence.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The New York Times by Alex Marshall.
In the week since the news of the thefts broke,
the case has been the subject of heated speculation in the British news media with daily articles conjecturing over how many artifacts had been lost and who was responsible.
Conjecturing, forming an idea or opinion with some amount of guesswork,
usually involves more than simply throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.
But that's the gist, and with good etymological reason.
Conjecture comes ultimately from the Latin verb conicere, which means literally, to throw together.
To conjecture is to make an educated guess rather than a stab in the dark.
It involves piecing together bits of information to come to a plausible conclusion,
as in scientists conjecturing about the cause of the disease.
As such, conjecture tends to show up in formal contexts rather than informal ones,
though we reckon one could conjecture
if their spaghetti is perfectly cooked based on the amount of time it has been boiling,
and on what has worked in the past.
Notabene, throwing it at the wall doesn't work.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.