Talk:guesstimate

I've changed "portmanteau" to "blend" here. "Blend" is the technically correct term and was being used before Carroll defined "portmanteau word" to mean the same thing. — Paul G 11:21, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Earliest Usenet uses via Google Groups

• guesstimates (noun): fa.space - 7 Oct 1981 by Mike Lease

  Of course, I am not taking into account wear and tear on the SPS -- anyone have any guesstimates on that issue?

• guesstimate (verb): fa.arms-d - 11 Jul 1982 by csin!cjh

  It has been pointed out that one of the reasons the defending Argentines in Port Stanley had to surrender to half their number of besiegers was the relative qualities of the officers and enlisted men in the two armies; would anyone care to guesstimate the relative qualities of Libyan and American flight training programs?

• guesstimate (noun): net.space - 22 Nov 1982 by CCA-UNIX

  Clarke specifically states (e.g. in "Take a Deep Breath") his assumption that short-term survival in airless conditions would require venting oneself as effectively as possible---emptying the lungs, leaving the mouth wide open, and hoping that the eustachian tubes are clear so you don't lose an eardrum; his guesstimate was that you could survive this way for about a minute.

• guesstimated: net.astro - 15 Oct 1985 by Phil R. Karn

  Now assuming that the impact velocity would be about 70 km/sec (30 km/sec for the earth's orbital motion + guesstimated 40 km/sec for the comet, since it is in a retrograde orbit), the released energy on impact would be about 5e23 J.

• guesstimating: comp.sys.cbm - Dec 21 1987, 2:55 pm by Doug Pardee

  This can be gotten around by looking at the map and guesstimating by eyeball, but I think it's a technical oversight.

• guesstimation: soc.college - Mar 21 1989, 1:32 pm by Tom Wilson

  Obviously there is a high degree of guesstimation in the Readers/Posters columns, although in a couple of cases I got responses from news admins who (maybe :-) have a better idea of the number of people.

• guesstimations: comp.lang.c - Oct 15 1989, 8:20 pm by Michael Hunter

  You can tell me that you carefully track down those bugs in that new package that some other company wrote that you only have object and poor doc to, but for some reason I think that you are going to use you well honed intuition and take some guesstimations at the troubles.

• guesstimator: soc.culture.asian.american - Jun 10 1992, 10:23 am by Anthony Murtagh

  apparently, i am not a good guesstimator.

• guesstimators: alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo - Sep 8 1992, 5:04 am by Mark "Crimson" Friedman

  Freddy stared deeply into her dark features as if to try to find the answer like the guesstimators at circuses and county fairs did.

• guesstimaters: rec.photo.equipment.35mm - Mar 28 1996, 7:58 pm by DAVID ROSEN

  Only the Contax and Leica lenses have positive focus ranging. The others are all guesstimaters.

• guesstimater: rec.photo.equipment.35mm - Feb 22 1997, 3:10 pm by David Rosen

  As to AF, active IR is usually confused by windows but the flash should give you plenty of DoF for safe guess focusing [scale is *metric* on Hexar], and if the shop display has any depth to it, there is no single point of focus anyway -- you need plenty of DoF even if you are an expert distance guesstimater.

• guesstimatory: rec.arts.drwho - Nov 24 1999, 11:02 am by Jonathan Blum

  When you were shooting entire episodes straight through, one a week, pretty much as live, it was much easier to get accurate timings of your script, but the more time you spend rehearsing and shooting out of order the more guesstimatory your scripts become.

— Hippietrail 13:31, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)