Speculative may refer to:

In arts and entertainment

Speculative fiction Speculative fiction is an umbrella term, umbrella genre of fiction that encompasses all the subgenres that depart from Realism (arts), realism, or strictly imitating everyday reality, instead presenting fantastical, supernatural, futuristic, or ...

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

In computing

Speculative execution Speculative execution is an optimization (computer science), optimization technique where a computer system performs some task that may not be needed. Work is done before it is known whether it is actually needed, so as to prevent a delay that woul ...

, 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, 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, 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 economy is an area of the Production (economics), production, Distribution (economics), distribution and trade, as well as Consumption (economics), consumption of Goods (economics), goods and Service (economics), services. In general, it is ...

, 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