Number & MeasureGreek → English
Heuristic
/hjʊˈrɪstɪk/adjective
Using a rough practical rule that reaches a workable answer quickly without guaranteeing the best one.
The Greek roots
εὑρίσκειν
heurískein
to find, discover
Literally: “serving to find out”
Follow a root:εὑρίσκειν1 word
The story of the word
Archimedes shouting εὕρηκα was using the perfect tense of this verb: I have found it. The word entered English in the early nineteenth century out of German scholarly usage, meaning a method that helps discovery rather than proves a result. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave it its current sense in 1974, describing the mental shortcuts people use under uncertainty and the errors they reliably produce.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German → English
- First recorded
- 1821
Same family
eurekaheuristics
In a sentence
The scheduler uses a heuristic that is wrong about one job in fifty and fast about the rest.