How to Use overestimate in a Sentence

overestimate

1 of 2 verb
  • Better to overestimate our flaws than to fail to see them in the first place.
    — Leslie Jamison, New Yorker, 4 Aug. 2025
  • In short, people tend to overestimate how much their feelings come across to others.
    — Dave Smith, Fortune, 17 Oct. 2025
  • Students have been know to wildly overestimate the ages of their teachers.
    — Christine Loman, Washington Post, 24 May 2023
  • But investors may be overestimating the hit these companies will take due to this shift.
    — Lisa Kailai Han, CNBC, 10 Aug. 2025
  • First off, thanks for overestimating me.
    — Sean Joseph Outkick, FOXNews.com, 7 May 2026
  • But that, to me, overestimates the show’s ubiquity.
    — Ben Travers, IndieWire, 20 Mar. 2026
  • None of this is helped by the fact that many swimmers greatly overestimate their swimming abilities.
    — Kaleb A. Brown, Detroit Free Press, 8 July 2020
  • So forget the bots and Russian trolls, or at least don’t overestimate their influence.
    — Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2020
  • The police had overestimated Ramírez’s height by an inch or two but most of the other details were correct.
    — Literary Hub, 16 Jan. 2026
  • Both trackers also overestimate my awake time after falling asleep.
    — Corey Gaskin, Ars Technica, 30 Apr. 2022
  • Their solution was to blindly overestimate the taxes the state would collect.
    — George Skelton, Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 2023
  • Employees often overestimate what can be done in a week, but underestimate what can be done in a year.
    — Expert Panel®, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2021
  • The distress the Sussexes caused the Queen in the last years of her life cannot be overestimated.
    — Jack Royston, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Mar. 2026
  • Those errors led Schultz to overestimate just how much room other primates had to shepherd their babies through the birth canal.
    — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 29 June 2026
  • Data has shown that most adults actually overestimate their skill level in the water.
    — Helen Carefoot, Flow Space, 23 Apr. 2026
  • Too often, Mendler said, people overestimate the risks of trying something new.
    — Preston Fore, Fortune, 12 June 2026
  • But in at least some cases, a blindingly bright black hole could be leading researchers to overestimate the heft of the surrounding stars.
    — WIRED, 5 Nov. 2023
  • Each side, in short, overestimates the other’s coherence.
    — Lizzi C. Lee, Time, 17 Oct. 2025
  • As a result, much of this research may be overestimating the number of microplastics.
    — Anne McNeil, The Conversation, 26 Mar. 2026
  • Your mind is hard-wired to give the under-estimator the power to overestimate any career challenge.
    — Bryan Robinson, Forbes.com, 7 Sep. 2025
  • But when a poll does include them, the results tend to drastically overestimate their support, data shows.
    — Rebecca Davis O’Brien, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2024
  • Specifically, the lawsuit accuses the city of overestimating the number of homes that will pay for new trash fee.
    — Jeff McDonald, San Diego Union-Tribune, 9 Apr. 2026
  • Most students in the survey overestimated the earning power of their degrees.
    — Daniel De Visé, USA Today, 29 May 2026
  • Some economists say towns tend to overestimate the economic benefits of theme parks like Legoland.
    — New York Times, 1 Oct. 2021
  • Many people chronically overestimate how much sun an area receives.
    — Kerry Michaels, The Spruce, 5 Feb. 2026
  • Still, Clark and Alaimo warned parents to not overestimate their ability to provide safety from afar.
    — Avni Trivedi, CNN Money, 15 June 2026
  • While patients should be aware of potential side effects for any medication, experts said many overestimate the risk of statins.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, NBC news, 25 June 2026
  • At the same time, students across majors overestimated the future value of their degrees, Clever found.
    — Jessica Dickler, CNBC, 4 May 2026
  • So in schools that have installed these filters, carbon dioxide readings alone may overestimate the risk of viral transmission.
    — The New York Times, Arkansas Online, 11 Oct. 2021
  • Their contribution to the pulse of this reverberant tale cannot be overestimated.
    — David L. Coddoncontributor, San Diego Union-Tribune, 24 Feb. 2023

overestimate

2 of 2 noun
  • This is an overestimate of the number of shots.
    — Sony Salzman, ABC News, 4 Sep. 2025
  • Some analysts believe that even this figure may be an overestimate.
    — Grant Smith, Fortune, 1 Mar. 2026
  • That might lead to an overestimate of its prevalence—and an indicator of civilization where there may be none.
    — Meghan Herbst, Wired, 4 Mar. 2021
  • In fact, the reviewers said if anything the $55 million was an overestimate.
    — jsonline.com, 2 Sep. 2021
  • Asymptomatic cases may spread the virus unknowingly and since they may not be identified, the death rate may be an overestimate.
    — Mark Kortepeter, Forbes.com, 20 May 2025
  • Those figures are overestimates, even before accounting for the savings from improved health.
    — Kenneth E Thorpe, San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 Sep. 2025
  • When people are shown polling data that corrects this overestimate, their own support for anti-democratic measures drops by more than a third.
    — Marshall Ingwerson, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 Feb. 2024
  • However, the team cautions that 38 is likely an overestimate, so the number may be even lower.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 13 Feb. 2023
  • But Klausner and others suspect the rate of prior infection presented in the study was a gross overestimate.
    — Arthur Allen, Anchorage Daily News, 10 Oct. 2021
  • Due to our simplifying assumptions that’s likely an overestimate, but the increase is real.
    — Rhett Allain, Wired News, 14 Nov. 2025
  • But Klausner and others suspect that the rate of previous infections presented in the study was a gross overestimate.
    — NBC News, 6 Oct. 2021
  • Yet even if each patient generated a book’s worth of text (a gross overestimate), this is far less data than what is currently used to train existing foundation models.
    — Jenna Wiens, STAT, 25 Aug. 2023
  • Rather, there was a consistent overestimate of minorities, and underestimate of whites.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 7 Jan. 2012
  • Indeed, Vakil and Rassam overestimate Khamenei’s ability to drive events.
    — Alex Vatanka, Foreign Affairs, 13 June 2017
  • For this reason, even progressive economists think Warren’s projection that $187 billion would be raised by her wealth tax is a vast overestimate.
    — Brad Polumbo, National Review, 28 Aug. 2020
  • Lynett said officials made accurate predictions of wave heights across the West Coast but may look into whether or not there were overestimates of the tsunami’s impacts in Hawaii.
    — Andrea Klick, Oc Register, 30 July 2025
  • This number may be an overestimate as some of the reports received by the Weather Service may be duplicates (multiple reports from the same tornado).
    — Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2021
  • But with many schools closed or in limited operation this academic year, there were fewer people losing their jobs, meaning the seasonal adjustment most likely caused an overestimate in the gain in jobs.
    — New York Times, 6 Aug. 2021
  • The battery indicators are showing Incorrect numbers; some handhelds overestimate while others underestimate the amount of time left to play before the battery dies.
    — James Peckham, PC Magazine, 12 June 2025
  • This hyper-visibility can also catalyze backlashes to equality when people who are fooled by the diversity shell game overestimate progress on diversity and resist change.
    — J. Nathan Matias, WIRED, 26 Mar. 2023
  • An analysis of 18 major forest carbon-credits projects, for example, found vast overestimates of their conservation impacts, per a study published last year in Science.
    — Alan Neuhauser, Axios, 24 July 2024
  • Kimmel added that Rodgers suffers from the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which states that people with limited competence overestimate their skills or intelligence.
    — Mike Freeman, USA TODAY, 9 Jan. 2024
  • According to its calculations, more than 23 million Americans are receiving some form of unemployment relief, but that is probably an overestimate.
    — Ben Casselman, New York Times, 22 Oct. 2020
  • Retailers’ concerns about modest price increases overestimate impacts on consumption while undervaluing nationwide job creation.
    — Joseph Ferrara, Sourcing Journal, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Neither measure is wholly accurate—one is likely an underestimate, the other an overestimate—but the comparison shows that Russia’s economy is nowhere near as small as the conventional wisdom holds.
    — Michael Kofman, Foreign Affairs, 19 Oct. 2021
  • Fewer than ten thousand individuals remain worldwide of the Siler pincushion cactus, according to a 2006 survey that Wellard fears is now an overestimate.
    — The Salt Lake Tribune, 31 Oct. 2020
  • And even those lackluster stats could be an overestimate, because they’re drawn from the National Immunization Surveys, which is done by phone and so reflects the answers of people willing to take federal surveyors’ calls.
    — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 2 Nov. 2023
  • District officials say these intentional overestimates are necessary because Boston’s enrollment is particularly fluid and the system has many small programs.
    — Christopher Huffaker, BostonGlobe.com, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Even that figure may well be an overestimate, given the country’s small number of haredi Orthodox Jews, the population that most often speaks Yiddish in their regular lives, and high rates of assimilation.
    — Katarzyna Andersz, sun-sentinel.com, 17 Nov. 2021
  • Across the demographics there is an average underestimate in absolute values of non-Hispanic whites by 10 percentage points, and an overestimate of minorities (excluding Jews here) of about 15 percentage points.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 7 Jan. 2012

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'overestimate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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