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detect - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

  • ️Sat Dec 17 2022

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Latin detectus, perfect passive participle of detegere (“to uncover or disclose”), from de- + tegere (“to cover”); see tegument, tile, thatch.

detect (third-person singular simple present detects, present participle detecting, simple past and past participle detected)

  1. To discover or find by careful search, examination, or probing.

    • 1960 June, “Talking of Trains: New B.R. research laboratory”, in Trains Illustrated, page 329:

      Diesel maintenance schedules are benefiting from work done on the magnificent Hilger & Watts electronic spectrograph for oil analysis, which detects minute quantities of metals in samples of used lubricating oil; [...].

to discover or find by careful search, examination, or probing

detect (not comparable)

  1. (obsolete) Detected.

Back-formation from detective.

detect (third-person singular simple present detects, present participle detecting, simple past and past participle detected)

  1. (intransitive, informal) To work or solve cases as a detective.

    • 1926, Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (Lord Peter Wimsey; 2), T. Fisher Unwin, →ISBN, page 105:

      Parker would in all likelihood have done so; he was paid to detect and to do nothing else, and neither his natural gifts nor his education (at Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School) prompted him to stray into side-tracks at the beck of an ill-regulated imagination.

    • 1991, Hillary Waugh, Hillary Waugh's Guide to Mysteries & Mystery Writing Novel, Writer's Digest Books, →ISBN, page 11:

      In a detective story, a detective detects; an active effort is made to determine who committed a given crime, and detecting the identity of a criminal could not be done until there were detectives.

    • 2019 May 9, Ben Kenigsberg, “'Pokémon Detective Pikachu' Review: A Cat and (Electric) Mouse Game”, in The New York Times‎[1], archived from the original on 2022-12-17:

      That aversion is tested when he teams up with Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds), his father's detecting partner, after the father appears to have been killed in an accident.