Intelligence
What is Estimative language?
Standard words such as "likely" or "almost certainly" used in intelligence to express probability consistently.
Estimative language is a fixed vocabulary for expressing probability in intelligence writing, so that "likely" means roughly the same thing to every reader. Common scales map words to ranges, for example "almost certainly" for 95 per cent or more, "likely" for about 55 to 80 per cent and "unlikely" for about 20 to 45 per cent.
The idea goes back to Sherman Kent's 1964 essay on words of estimative probability. Using a published scale stops writers from hiding uncertainty behind vague words such as "possibly" or "may".