postulate
Americanverb (used with object)
-
postulates,
present (3rd person singular)
-
postulated,
past participle, past
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postulating
present participle
-
to ask, demand, or claim.
-
to claim or assume the existence or truth of, especially as a basis for reasoning or arguing.
-
to assume without proof, or as self-evident; take for granted.
- Synonyms:
- conjecture, presuppose, hypothecate
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Mathematics, Logic. to assume as a postulate.
noun
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postulates
plural
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something taken as self-evident or assumed without proof as a basis for reasoning.
- Synonyms:
- conjecture, assumption, axiom, theory, hypothesis
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Mathematics, Logic. a proposition that requires no proof, being self-evident, or that is for a specific purpose assumed true, and that is used in the proof of other propositions; axiom.
-
a fundamental principle.
-
a necessary condition; prerequisite.
verb
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to assume to be true or existent; take for granted
-
to ask, demand, or claim
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to nominate (a person) to a post or office subject to approval by a higher authority
noun
-
something taken as self-evident or assumed as the basis of an argument
-
a necessary condition or prerequisite
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a fundamental principle
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logic maths an unproved and indemonstrable statement that should be taken for granted: used as an initial premise or underlying hypothesis in a process of reasoning
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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postulationnoun
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repostulatenoun
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repostulationnoun
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repostulateverb (used with object)
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postulationaladjective
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unpostulatedadjective
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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postulatesimple
-
postulatessimple
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have postulatedperfect
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has postulatedperfect
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am postulatingprogressive
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are postulatingprogressive
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is postulatingprogressive
-
have been postulatingperfect progressive
-
has been postulatingperfect progressive
Past
-
postulatedsimple
-
had postulatedperfect
-
was postulatingprogressive
-
were postulatingprogressive
-
had been postulatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of postulate
1525–35; < Latin postulātum petition, thing requested, noun use of neuter of past participle of postulāre to request, demand, akin to pōscere to request
Explanation
Assume something or present it as a fact and you postulate it. Physicists postulate the existence of parallel universes, which is a little mind-blowing. Anyone who has suffered through geometry class is familiar with some of the greatest hits, like Euclid's postulate and the point-line-plane postulate. Those are propositions that have to be assumed for other mathematical statements to follow logically. As a verb (pronounced "POST-you-late") it describes the act of presenting an idea, theory, belief, or concept.
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
That being said, they postulate that the raise stemmed in part from a supply-demand imbalance.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 22, 2026
Researchers postulate that repeated exposure of this sort allowed the virus to push into the cells — a brute force entry more than a lock-picking.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 5, 2024
We don't know, but the postquantum theory doesn't require the measurement postulate, because the classicality of spacetime infects quantum systems and causes them to localise.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 4, 2023
“They postulate some ‘dark sector’ based on hypothetical dark matter physics, but it does not have any direct observational motivation.”
From Salon ● Nov. 30, 2023
Of course it is in some sense an act of faith to postulate the existence of an actual girl, or even two.
From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides
The "capture" hypothesis meanwhile postulates that the moons are asteroids from the outer Solar System that were captured by Mars' gravity.
From Barron's ● Aug. 16, 2026
In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, they found that one of the postulates used in the 2021 analysis was more restrictive than necessary.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 13, 2026
In the Science Fiction Novella “Nightfall”, Isaac Asimov postulates how a civilization would face a solar eclipse in a multiple star solar system that only experienced night once every two thousand years.
From Salon ● Apr. 11, 2024
There’s also string theory, which describes the universe as made of almost unimaginably small vibrating strings and, in current versions, postulates the existence of at least 10 dimensions.
From Scientific American ● Aug. 19, 2023
I started to think a lot about infinity, and what it was like there, and how all the postulates and theorems and principles were true across all the universe.
From "October Sky" by Homer Hickam
One tech expert postulated that Hugging Face was an example of an AI that got scared because it couldn’t complete its task.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 9, 2026
Although much has been discovered about selfish element silencing in the thirty years since Denise Barlow postulated her theory, a direct connection between germline defense mechanisms and the origin of parent-of-origin effects was missing.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 6, 2024
Just as a thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated that a cat could be in a quantum state that is both dead and alive, a qubit can be both 1 and 0 simultaneously.
From New York Times ● Jun. 14, 2023
"Disinformation runs rampant on online forums because there's no one checking," Simon postulated.
From Salon ● Jan. 30, 2023
The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had postulated.
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
The research is anchored in a theory postulating that emotions are generated when human cognition evaluates events from various perspectives.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 4, 2024
Even postulating today’s miserable 2 percent growth, and ignoring compounding, GDP in 2100 would be 160 percent larger than today.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 26, 2022
In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 8, 2019
And Peter Higgs’ theory postulating the so-called “God particle” named the Higgs boson didn’t win its Nobel until the actual particle was discovered by a massive European particle collider.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 14, 2018
Flamsteed was one of the first people to suggest that the phenomenon was really a single object, postulating that it had been repelled from the Sun by some sort of magnetic effect.
From "The Scientists" by John Gribbin
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
