hunch
noun

- a feeling or guess based on intuition

Oxford English Dictionary

verb

- to bend or draw up into a hump (I hunched my shoulders against the wind.)
- to assume a crouched or cramped posture (The cat hunched in a corner.)

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

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WORD ORIGIN

Hunch was originally (1581) a verb meaning "to push, thrust." The figurative sense of "hint, tip" (a "push" toward a solution or answer) was first recorded in 1849. This eventually led to the sense of "an intuitive feeling."

Hunch can be used in the expression "I have a hunch that…" to describe a feeling that one has about something without having any real proof. A shorter form is "My hunch is that…." A hunch is merely instinct, a way for people to rely on past experiences or acquired knowledge to make a decision when specific information or data cannot be recalled.

Hunches play an important role in many decisions, whether it's an investor evaluating an unknown company, or a writer who is thinking about new material for a book. The renowned children's book author Dr. Theodore Seuss once wrote:

I was following a Nowhere Hunch,
A real dumb thing to do!
Everybody sometimes does it.
Even me. And even you.
Oh, you get so many hunches
that you don't know ever quite
if the right hunch is a wrong hunch!
Then the wrong hunch might be right!"

From the book "Hunches In Bunches"

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SYNONYMS

boding, clue, expectation, feeling, funny feeling, glimmer, gut feeling, hint, impression, inkling, instinct, intuition, notion, portent, preconceived notion, premonition, presagement, prescience, presentiment, suspicion, thought


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Practice OWAD in a conversation:

"I have a HUNCH we'll increase sales with this new campaign."