Word.ws English Dictionary

second-guessed

second-guessed is the simple past and past participle of second-guess.

Meaning of second-guess

Verb

second-guess (third-person singular simple present second-guesses, present participle second-guessing, simple past and past participle second-guessed)

  1. (transitive) To vet or evaluate; to criticize or correct, often by hindsight, by presuming to have a better idea, method, etc.
    • Please don't try to second-guess the procedure that we have already refined and adopted.
  2. (intransitive, transitive) To anticipate or predict someone's actions or thoughts by guesswork.
    • In this day and age, it's so easy to stress / 'Cause people are strange and you can never second-guess2000, Paul Godfrey, Ross Godfrey, Skye Edwards, “Rome Wasn't Built In a Day”, in Fragments of Freedom, performed by Morcheeba

Questions about second-guessed

What is second-guessed the simple past and past participle of?
Second-guessed is the simple past and past participle of second-guess.

Words near second-guessed in the dictionary

  1. second-growth forest
  2. second-growth forests
  3. second-guarder
  4. second-guarders
  5. second-guess
  6. second-guessed
  7. second-guesser
  8. second-guessers
  9. second-guesses
  10. second-guessing
  11. second-guessings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: second-guessed (page history and authors); second-guess (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “second-guessed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/second-guessed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.