From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishhypotheticalhy‧po‧thet‧i‧cal /ˌhaɪpəˈθetɪkəl◂/ ●○○ AWL adjective SUGGESTbased on a situation that is not real, but that might happenhypothetical situation/example/question Brennan brought up a hypothetical case to make his point. The question is purely hypothetical. → imaginary —hypothetically /-kli/ adverb
Examples from the Corpus
hypothetical• The data are hypothetical and the axes are logarithmically transformed to produce straight lines instead of curves.• He or she can reason effectively about the present, past, and future, the hypothetical, and verbal propositional problems.• They are inferred to exist and are properly called hypothetical constructs.!• Income, consumption and savings for a hypothetical economy.• If the theories are successful, some one will find a more direct way of showing that the hypothetical entities are actually there.• By the 1870s Darwinians were using diagrams showing hypothetical family trees to account for relationships among species.• The car insurance for a hypothetical family with two cars and three drivers would be $3,200 a year.• Theoretical explanations in the sciences tend to be of an essentially hypothetical nature.hypothetical situation/example/question• A calculation of this sort may be illustrated by the following hypothetical example.• None of these is a hypothetical situation.• An hypothetical example can further illustrate the difficulties.• Concrete operational children, lacking fully developed deductive reasoning about hypothetical situations, can not solve problems in this form.• Let us first consider a hypothetical example drawn from the earlier discussion of the causes of absenteeism.• Consider the following hypothetical example from political science.• One of our questions confronted the respondents with the hypothetical situation of the marriage of a son or daughter.• Profits and expanding industries A few hypothetical examples will explain more concretely how the market system determines what is to be produced. 