Other forms: surveys, surveyed, surveying
A survey is a set of questions put to a lot of people to find out what they think or what they do. Somebody stops you outside the supermarket with a clipboard; an email asks you to rate your delivery out of ten.
The stress moves when it turns into a verb: a SURvey lands in your inbox, but you surVEY a room, running your eyes across the whole of it at once. Surveyors do it with instruments — they survey land, measure it and draw it, which is a trade of its own. In Britain a survey is also the report you pay for before buying a house, the one that finds the damp behind the wardrobe. You carry out or conduct a survey, it is always a survey of something, and the people who answer are respondents: a survey of 2,000 adults found that a third had never voted.
1nounsurveyA set of questions asked of many people to find out what they think or do.~56%
“A survey of 2,000 drivers found that half had never checked their tyres.”
synonyms: questionnaire, poll
2verblookTo look carefully over the whole of something.~7%
“He stood on the roof and surveyed the flooded fields.”
synonyms: scan
3verbputTo put a set of questions to a group of people.~2%
“We surveyed every household on the street.”
4nouninspectionA careful measurement or inspection — of a piece of land, or of a house before it is bought.~35%
“The survey found damp in both bedrooms.”
synonyms: inspection
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 164 sentences found in the wild and placed 160 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: questionnaire
SUR-vey → SERVE
A waiter walks round the tables with a silver tray. There are no drinks on it, only small white cards with one question printed on each, and he serves one to every person in the room.
hooks ontoserve
Old French surveer was to oversee: sur-, over, plus veeir, to see, from Latin videre. To survey is still to look over — over a field, over a crowd, over two thousand answers on a screen. Supervision is the same two pieces in Latin clothes.
Latin
videre
Old French
sourveoir
Middle English
surveyen
English, today
survey
Built from
From Middle English surveyen, from Old French sourveoir, surveer (“to oversee”), from sour-, sur- (“over”) + veoir, veeir (“to see”), from Latin videre. See sur- and vision. Related to supervision.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA