Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary - infer

 verb  (~red; ~ring)  Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French ~er, from Latin ~re, literally, to carry or bring into, from in- + ferre to carry — more at bear  Date: 1528  transitive verb  1. to derive as a conclusion from facts or premises we see smoke and ~ fire — L. A. White — compare imply  2. guess, surmise your letter…allows me to ~ that you are as well as ever — O. W. Holmes †1935  3.  a. to involve as a normal outcome of thought  b. to point out ; indicate this doth ~ the zeal I had to see him — Shakespeare another survey…~s that two-thirds of all present computer installations are not paying for themselves — H. R. Chellman  4. suggest, hint are you ~ring I'm incompetent?  intransitive verb to draw ~ences men…have observed, ~red, and reasoned…to all kinds of results — John Dewey  • ~able also ~rible adjective  • ~rer noun Synonyms:  ~, deduce, conclude, judge, gather mean to arrive at a mental conclusion. ~ implies arriving at a conclusion by reasoning from evidence; if the evidence is slight, the term comes close to surmise from that remark, I ~red that they knew each other. deduce often adds to ~ the special implication of drawing a particular ~ence from a generalization denied we could deduce anything important from human mortality. conclude implies arriving at a necessary ~ence at the end of a chain of reasoning concluded that only the accused could be guilty. judge stresses a weighing of the evidence on which a conclusion is based judge people by their actions. gather suggests an intuitive forming of a conclusion from implications gathered their desire to be alone without a word. Usage:  Sir Thomas More is the first writer known to have used both ~ and imply in their approved senses (1528). He is also the first to have used ~ in a sense close in meaning to imply (1533). Both of these uses of ~ coexisted without comment until some time around the end of World War I. Since then, senses 3 and 4 of ~ have been frequently condemned as an undesirable blurring of a useful distinction. The actual blurring has been done by the commentators. Sense 3, descended from More's use of 1533, does not occur with a personal subject. When objections arose, they were to a use with a personal subject (now sense 4). Since dictionaries did not recognize this use specifically, the objectors assumed that sense 3 was the one they found illogical, even though it had been in respectable use for four centuries. The actual usage condemned was a spoken one never used in logical discourse. At present sense 4 is found in print chiefly in letters to the editor and other informal prose, not in serious intellectual writing. The controversy over sense 4 has apparently reduced the frequency of use of sense 3.