Other forms: descried
To descry is to catch sight of something far off. Descry a sail, descried in the distance, descry the shore.
It is literary and belongs to lookouts and to poetry, and it means making something out with effort rather than merely seeing it. It is a different word from decry, which means to condemn.
1verbdescryTo catch sight of something far off.
“Through the mist, the sailors could just descry the outline of land.”
descry is a seeing.
Middle English descrien comes from Old French descrier, to proclaim, which also carried the sense of catching sight.
Old French
descrier — to proclaim, announce, cry
Middle English
descrien
English, today
descry
Built from
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 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 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).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA