Other forms: transpired, transpires, transpiring
To transpire is to turn out to be so, or to become known. The facts emerge, and now everybody has them.
It takes that, and it is nearly always impersonal, so it transpired that nobody had been told. Careful writers restrict it to that meaning, since the looser use meaning simply to happen is disliked by some, though it is now common enough to be standard. Botany has the original sense, since plants transpire by releasing water vapour through their leaves, and transpiration is a technical term.
Transpire is breathing through. Medieval Latin transpirare joins trans, across, to spirare, to breathe, which is what a leaf does with water; news that transpires has escaped the same way.
Latin
trans — across
Medieval Latin
transpirare — to breathe through
Middle French
transpirer
English, today
transpire
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French transpirer, from Medieval Latin transpirare (“to breathe through”), from Latin trans (“across”) spirare (“to breathe”). The sense “to become known” is also present in French, while the sense “to happen” is not; the latter probably developed in English from the former.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA