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Business English vocabulary · Numbers and Money

Estimate

Meaning in business english, with examples

/ˈestɪmət/nounCore term

In business english, estimate means: A careful guess at a number, cost or amount of time, based on the information you have; also a written statement of the likely price of a job.

In Turkish: tahmin, tahmini maliyet, ön hesap

How it is used

Used in planning and with suppliers: 'a rough estimate', 'Can you give me an estimate?', 'Our estimate is six weeks'. An estimate can change later, while a quote is usually a fixed price.

Example sentences

  1. Our best estimate is that the project will take four months.

  2. We asked three agencies for an estimate before choosing one.

Common collocations

  • rough estimate
  • give an estimate
  • conservative estimate
  • cost estimate
  • best estimate
  • ballpark figureA rough estimate of a number, such as a price or cost, given when the exact figure is not yet known.
  • quoteA written or spoken statement of the exact price a supplier will charge for a particular job, product or service.
  • forecastA statement of what is expected to happen in the future, especially to sales, costs or demand, based on current data and trends.
  • budgetThe amount of money that a company, team or project plans to spend over a period of time, or the plan that shows this.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Numbers and Money

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