descry
/dɪˈskɹaɪ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.32 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "[I]f the Harte ſhould rowze for feare a farre of [off], his hound (hunting vpon the winde) might carie him amiſſe, ſo that he ſhould not finde the layre. Whereby (⁊ by yͤ foyles about it) he might haue certain iudgement: and if he rowze or vnharbor the Deare ⁊ find the layre, let him not blow ouer haſtely for yͤ hoűds [hounds], but onely cry, Looke ware, looke ware, ware, ware and let him draw on with his hound vntil yͤ Deare be diſcried, ⁊ rightly marked before he hallow."
- "The kalender, […] hath late deſcry'd / That evill affected planet Mars, ally'd / To temporizing Mercury, conjoyn'd / I'th'houſe of Death; […]"
- "His Body was found almost naked in the field, for his Purple Robe he had thrown aside, lest it should descry him, unwilling to be found."
- "VVe vvere deſcried, theyle mock vs novv dounright."
- "Wee haue descryed vpon our neighbouring / shore, a portlie saile of ships make hitherward."
- "—Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks."
Etymology
From Middle English descrien, descriven in the 14th century already had the dual sense of "to proclaim, announce, make known" and "to see, discern, discover". On the one hand, the Middle English word is a loan Old French descrier (“to proclaim, announce, cry”), from des- + crier (“shout, cry”); in this case, the word is a doublet of decry, which was loaned from the same French source in the 17th century. Alternatively, as suggested by the spelling descriven, the Middle English word may be a contraction of Old French descrire, descrivre (“to describe”), from Latin describere, and thus a doublet of describe (so Palmer 1890, attributing the view to Walter William Skeat), but modern dictionaries more often seem to prefer the view that there was a secondary, folk-etymological influence on descrien by descriven within Middle English (so The Century Dictionary 1911). The semantic shift from "announce" to "discern, detect" is via "to cry out on discovering something that has been looked for". Palmer (1890) compares the etymology of Latin explorare "to search a wood &c. with cries".