Speculative may refer to:

In arts and entertainment

Speculative fiction Speculative fiction is a term that has been used with a variety of (sometimes contradictory) meanings. The broadest interpretation is as a category of fiction encompassing genres with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, na ...

, which includes elements created out of human imagination, such as the science fiction and fantasy genres ** Speculative Fiction Group, a Persian literature group whose website which is named Fantasy Academy ** Speculative poetry, a genre of poetry that focuses on fantastic, science fictional and mythological themes * Speculative screenplay, or spec script, a non-commissioned, unsolicited screenplay *

The Speculative Society The Speculative Society is a Scottish Enlightenment society dedicated to public speaking and literary composition, founded in 1764. It was mainly, but not exclusively, an Edinburgh University student organisation. The formal purpose of the Societ ...

, a Scottish Enlightenment society dedicated to public speaking and literary composition, founded in 1764

In computing

* Speculative execution, in computer systems is doing work, the result of which may not be needed. This performance optimization technique is used in pipelined processors and other systems *

Speculative multithreading Thread Level Speculation (TLS), also known as Speculative Multithreading, or Speculative Parallelization, is a technique to speculatively execute a section of computer code that is anticipated to be executed later in parallel with the normal exec ...

, a dynamic parallelization technique that depends on out-of-order execution to achieve speedup on multiprocessor CPUs. It is a kind of speculative execution that occurs at the thread level as opposed to the instruction level

In economics

Speculation In finance, speculation is the purchase of an asset (a commodity, good (economics), goods, or real estate) with the hope that it will become more valuable shortly. (It can also refer to short sales in which the speculator hopes for a decline i ...

, the practice of engaging in risky transactions in an attempt to profit from fluctuations in market value ** Speculative attack, denoting precipitous acquisition of assets by previously inactive speculators ** Speculative demand, a demand for financial assets that is not dictated by real transactions such as trade or financing ** Speculative development, in real estate ** Speculative grade, a grade of bond below investment grade, having higher risk, but typically pay higher yield than better quality bonds **

Economic bubble An economic bubble (also called a speculative bubble or a financial bubble) is a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be c ...

, when assets trade at a price that far exceeds an asset's intrinsic value due to speculation

In linguistics

* Speculative mood, a grammatical mood found in some languages * Speculative grammarians, members of a school of grammarian philosophy known as Modism, active in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries *'' Speculative Grammarian'', a parody science journal

In philosophy

*Speculative philosophy, an aspect of Continental philosophy * Speculative realism, a movement in contemporary philosophy * Speculative reason, theoretical as opposed to practical thought

Other uses