descry
Part of speech: verb
Morphological type: simple
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".
Inflected forms:
form: descries
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: descrying
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: descried
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: descried
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: To announce a discovery: to disclose; to reveal.
pos: verb
tags: literary
transitive
examples: 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.
gloss: To see, especially from afar; to discover (a distant or obscure object) by the eye; to espy; to discern or detect.
pos: verb
tags: literary
transitive
examples: 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.
Edmund, I thinke, is gone, / In pitty of his miſery, to diſpatch / His nighted life: Moreouer to deſcry / The ſtrength o’ th’ Enemy.
And now thir way to Earth they had descri’d, / To Paradise first tending, […]
When I had pass’d the Vale where my Bower stood as above, I came within View of the Sea, to the West, and it being a very clear Day, I fairly descry’d Land—whether an Island or a Continent, I could not tell; but it lay very high, extending from the West to the W.S.W. at a very great Distance;
Judge Short had gone to town, and Farrar was off for a three days’ cruise up the lake. I was bitterly regretting I had not gone with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and I descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the direction of Mohair.
Dimly through the mists they could descry the long arm of the mountains rising on their left.
On the far hillside we are approaching can be descried a bridge on the first section (Ruabon–Llangollen) of the important G.W.R. branch to Dolgelley, which will shortly join our main line by means of a trailing junction.
Derived words: descriable
undescried
undescrying
Translations: