Skip to content
Allin

uncertainty

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ʌnˈsɜːtənti//
  • Canada//ʌnˈsɝtənti//
  • Australia//ɐnˈsɜːtənti//
  • New Zealand//ɐnˈsøːtənti//

Doubt; the condition of being uncertain or without conviction.

noun

  1. 1

    Doubt; the condition of being uncertain or without conviction.

    “Well,” I answered, at first with uncertainty, then with inspiration, “he would do splendidly to lead your cotillon, if you think of having one.” ¶ “So you do not dance, Mr. Crocker?” ¶ I was somewhat set back by her perspicuity.

    After spending so much of the season looking upwards, the swashbuckling style and swagger of early season Spurs was replaced by uncertainty and frustration against a Norwich side who had the quality and verve to take advantage

    Piecing together Corbynomics is difficult, not least because it has evolved during Mr Corbyn’s time in charge of Labour. The gulf between the Labour leadership’s past positions and the milder proposals in the manifesto means that enormous uncertainty hangs over what a Corbyn-led government would do in office.

    It's a full circle. Over the past 43 years, RAIL has reported on how the railways have gone from uncertainty under government control to sectorisation, privatisation, and back to uncertainty under government control.

  2. 2

    Something uncertain or ambiguous.

  3. 3

    A parameter that measures the dispersion of a range of measured values.

Etymology

From Middle English uncerteynte; equivalent to un- + certainty or uncertain + -ty.

Forms

plural
uncertainties
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).