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prospecting

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,937 of 15,258leans written

Prospecting is searching land for valuable minerals. Gold prospecting, go prospecting, prospecting rights.

The old image is a man with a pan in a river, and modern prospecting is geology, chemistry and satellite data. In sales the same word means looking for new customers, which is a borrowing of exactly the same picture.

Walker Art Studio (Montrose, Colorado) · Public domain

Definitions of prospecting

  1. 1nounprospectingSearching land for valuable minerals.C1

    “He went to Alaska in the gold rush and spent years prospecting in the hills.”

prospecting is a searching.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *speḱ-

  2. Latin

    prōspectus — view, sight, prospect; panorama

  3. Middle English

    prospecte

  4. English

    prospect

  5. English, today

    prospecting

Built from

  • prōspiciō · Latin — to look forward
  • pro · Latin — before, forward
  • spiciō · Latin — to look, to see

prospect comes from Middle English prospecte, from Latin prōspectus (“view, sight, prospect; panorama”), from prōspiciō (“to look forward”) + -tus, from pro (“before, forward”) + speciō, spiciō (“to look, to see”). by surface analysis, pro- + -spect. a doublet of prospectus and prospekt. The verb is from the noun.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Rocks & Minerals

Practise this word

prospecting in the wild

  • In other areas publicly held lands are open to prospecting without staking a mining claim.

    Prospecting

  • Gold prospecting is the act of searching for new gold deposits.

    Gold prospecting

  • Although traditionally a commercial activity, in some developed countries placer gold prospecting has also become a popular outdoor recreation.

    Gold prospecting

  • The history of uranium prospecting, especially in the Colorado Plateau of North America, has seen several methods of identifying likely ore body locations.

    Botanical prospecting for uranium

  • There is evidence that this form of prospecting is a valid scientific method, especially when used in conjunction with other prospecting methods.

    Geobotanical prospecting

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the spiciō family

prospectprospector

prospecting — used about once every 7,462 pages · #10,937 · point at the bar for the others