Other forms: described, describes, describing
To describe something is to say what it is like, so that a person who has not seen it can picture it. You describe the flat to a friend: two rooms, a balcony the size of a doormat, a view of the car park.
The order matters. You describe something TO someone, and 'describe me the house' is the mistake to avoid, because the person always takes TO. You also describe someone AS something: the witness described the man as tall and grey-haired. Formal and technical writing uses it for shapes and movements, as when a skater's blade describes a circle on the ice. The noun is description, the adjective descriptive, and when words fail there is indescribable.
1verbdescribeTo say or write what someone or something is like.~65%
“Can you describe the man who took the bag?”
2verbparticularTo call someone or something a particular thing.~33%
“She describes her childhood as noisy and happy.”
3verbmoveTo move in the shape of a particular line or figure.~2%
“The headlights described a slow arc across the ceiling.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Describe comes from Latin describo, 'to copy off, transcribe, sketch off, describe in painting or writing', made of de, 'off', and scribo, 'write'. It reached English through Old French descrivre and Middle English descriven. The scribo half is the one in scribe, so describing is writing something off from life. It pushed out the older native verb amearcian.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kreybʰ-
Latin
dēscrībō — to copy off, transcribe, sketch off, describe in painting or writing
Old French
descrivre
Middle English
descriven
English, today
describe
Built from
From Middle English descriven, from Old French descrivre, from Latin dēscrībō (“to copy off, transcribe, sketch off, describe in painting or writing”), from dē (“off”) + scrībō (“write”); see scribe and shrive. Displaced native āmearcian.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA