Suspect and Doubt
Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English Podcast. My name, as always, is Jordan and and today I want to talk about some words connected with thinking and believing. So let's jump in.
The two words that I want to focus on are suspect and doubt. So these words are both verbs. They're both action words, and they're connected with thinking and having an opinion. They are words which mean to believe something, but they are opposite in their meaning. So let's look at them one by one.
The first word is suspect. Suspect means to think that something might be true. You believe that something could be true. Maybe you have some feeling or maybe there's a clue. Maybe there's a little piece of information, maybe physical that gives you some idea that something is true. But you're not 100% sure. You are not 100% sure, but you believe that something could be true.
So, for example, let's say you bought some really delicious candy and you kept the candy in your car that you share with your family. And one day you find some that some of the candy has been taken. Some of your candy has been eaten and you find the empty wrappers of the candy on the floor of your car. Now you could suspect that maybe your partner ate some of your candy. You know that your partner enjoys candy and you suspect it was probably them. You think it was your partner, but you can't be sure you didn't see them eat the candy. You are not 100% sure that this is what happened. You could say, ‘I suspect that my partner ate my candy’. So… this is the word suspect. You think that something might be true.
The other word that I want to talk about is the word doubt. Now, doubt is quite a similar meaning word. Doubt means you think something might not be true. So it's kind of the opposite direction of suspect. Suspect means you think it might be true, and doubt means you think it it might not be true. It shows that you are not sure about something that you are uncertain. You don't think it is true. For example, if you are a student at university and you have a class that you don't study very hard in this class, you are not very enthusiastic about this class. You never really feel interested and you don't study hard for this subject. And one day you have a surprise test. And when you're answering the questions, you find them very difficult. After the test is finished and you're talking with your friends, you could say, ‘I doubt I'll pass the test’. You don't think that you're going to pass this test. You feel unconfident about your results. You don't think it is going to be successful. You don't think you will pass the test. So you say, I doubt I will pass the test.
So the important thing here is to remember both of the words suspect and doubt mean believing and thinking that something is true when you don't know you're not 100% sure, but they have opposite direction… opposite meaning. Suspect is that you think it might be true and doubt means you think it might not be true.
Okay. All right. So these two words can be quite tricky because of the very similar meaning. You just need to remember that doubt is the negative - you think it's not true.
Okay, as always, there's a full blog post on the website, Goldforestacademy.com, which goes into more detail with some similar connected verbs and some practices and things like that. So if you are interested, please check out the blog post.
Thank you very much for listening. I hope that this podcast is helpful for you and I wish you the best of luck with your English. Keep practicing and I'll see you in the next episode. Goodbye.