English Help Online's Blog

Hi there everyone. I apologize for not writing a blog entry for the last couple of days. I’m on vacation right now, so I don’t have the chance to write as often as I’d like to. Still, I’ll try to write the blog as much as I can.

Anyway, for today’s blog, I’d like to do another idiom: “a stab in the dark”. This can be used with either of the verbs “be” or “take”. It is used when we talk about make a complete guess about something that we don’t know the answer to at all. For example:

I don’t know what the capital of California is, but I’ll take a stab in the dark and say it’s Los Angeles.

A: How did you know the right answer to the teacher’s question? It was a really hard question.

B: I didn’t know it actually. It was a complete stab in the dark. I just got lucky.

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A: I really don’t know what the answer is.

B: Well, just take a stab in the dark. It’s better than saying nothing.

We can use this idiom whether or not we get the answer correct. Sometimes we do, as in the second example, and sometimes we don’t, as in the first example. (The capital of California is Sacramento).