| Library / English Dictionary |
HYPOTHETICAL
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A hypothetical possibility, circumstance, statement, proposal, situation, etc.
Example:
consider the following, just as a hypothetical
Classified under:
Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents
Hypernyms ("hypothetical" is a kind of...):
hypothesis; possibility; theory (a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena)
II. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Based primarily on surmise rather than adequate evidence
Example:
hypothetical situation
Synonyms:
conjectural; divinatory; hypothetic; hypothetical; supposed; suppositional; suppositious; supposititious
Classified under:
Similar:
theoretic; theoretical (concerned primarily with theories or hypotheses rather than practical considerations)
Derivation:
hypothesis (a message expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence)
Context examples:
Popp and Eggl found that on the far edge of the habitable zone in the Kepler 35 double-star system, the hypothetical water-covered planet would have a lot of variation in its surface temperatures.
(Earth-Sized 'Tatooine' Planets Could Be Habitable, NASA)
David Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator and his colleagues started to think about applying these insights to a hypothetical Mars-like planet in orbit around some type of M-star, or red dwarf, the most common class of stars in our galaxy.
(Mars Mission Sheds Light on Habitability of Distant Planets, NASA)
For their study, researchers neglected the gravitational influence of this planet and added a hypothetical water-covered, Earth-size planet around the Kepler 35 AB stars.
(Earth-Sized 'Tatooine' Planets Could Be Habitable, NASA)
This means that double-star systems of the type studied here are excellent candidates to host habitable planets, despite the large variations in the amount of starlight hypothetical planets in such a system would receive, said Max Popp, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
(Earth-Sized 'Tatooine' Planets Could Be Habitable, NASA)
