Welcome to Teacher Stumpers, a new series at English Spark, where we take a difficult question from class and take an in depth look at the answer.  Do you have a stumper that you want solved?  Send us an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

Let's take a look at our inaugural question:

What is the difference between presume and assume?

We are going to let you try to guess the answer before we go into what we found out.

So is the answer

1. They are the same *(&# thing.
2. The word presume is mostly used in legal or medical fields, e.g. "He was presumed innocent." However the word assume is for more general usage. 
3. Presume means to suppose or guess the outcome of something before it happens.  Whereas assume means to suppose or guess a truth after some evidence has come in.
4. Presume means to believe something to be true without proof of non-contrary evidence.  But assume means to suppose, postulate, claim something is true without checking or confirming it.

Dying for the answer?  Click on the 'Read more...' below to find out.

First presume
Presume comes from the Latin word "præsumere" meaning to 'anticipate taking up' where it moved to Old French "presumer" and then into Middle English with the meaning "to take upon oneself, to take liberty" in 1375.  It now has the meaning of "to believe something true without proof of non-contrary evidence." It is used a lot less often than assume; It appears about 90% less often than assume in all media.   It is more commonly used when discussing legal cases.  Specificallly, it is used when talking about innocence: "Presumed innocent until proven guilty." (Presumed because there is no contrary evidence, yet) It is commonly used with innocence, debt, and information.     

Next assume
Assume comes directly from Latin and actual shares a root with presume, "sumere" means "to take" and "as-" or "ad-" means "to, or up." This gives us the meaning of "to take up" in Latin.  This appeared in Middle English as "to take up into heaven" in 1436.   Later it took on the meaning of "to suppose something true without checking or confirming it" or "to take up the responsibilities of."  The word presume can not be used in the later sense.  For example the sentence "Sparky presumed the role of Grand Commander of the Universe." is wrong.  The word assume needs to be used instead.  Overall, the word assume is used 10 times more than presume (in spoken and written English).  Assume is usually used with (collocated with) responsibility(s), role(s), position(s), control, leadership and other words referring to power.

So, the answer is 4:

Presume means to believe something to be true without proof of non-contrary evidence.  But assume means to suppose, postulate, claim something is true without checking or confirming it. 

I hope this helps.  Thanks for reading our article.  If you have a stumper you would like addressed please let us know.   Send us an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with your question and we will do our best to answer it.  Have a different explanation? Please make a comment on this article.