FreeScrabbleDictionary

descry

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
12
Words With Friends
12
Letters
6
Pronunciation
/dɪˈskɹaɪ/

Definition of descry

2 senses · 1 part of speech · etymology included

verb

  1. (literary, transitive)To announce a discovery: to disclose; to reveal.
    “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.”
See all 2 definitions

verb

  1. (literary, transitive)To announce a discovery: to disclose; to reveal.
    “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.”
  2. (literary, transitive)To see, especially from afar; to discover (a distant or obscure object) by the eye; to espy; to discern or detect.
    “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, […]”

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

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…

See full 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".

Anagrams of descry

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