hedging
General noun
The use of cautious language such as modal verbs and qualifiers to soften claims and signal appropriate uncertainty.
Effective hedging allows a writer to present findings confidently while acknowledging their provisional nature.
Medicine noun
The use of cautious, tentative language to avoid stating something as absolutely certain, especially about diagnosis or prognosis.
A degree of hedging is honest medicine — I'd rather say 'it's most likely a virus' than promise it definitely is.
Business noun
The taking of an offsetting position to reduce exposure to adverse price movements.
Aggressive hedging insulated the miner's revenues when copper prices collapsed.
Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.
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