Discovering

How to spell discovering

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce discovering

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does discovering mean?

1. verbFinding, learning, or becoming aware of something for the first time.

Discovering in a sentence

• She spent the weekend discovering new walking routes near her home.

• The auditors kept discovering small errors in the older accounts.

Where does discovering come from?

Language of origin: French

The word goes back to the Latin cooperire, meaning 'to cover over completely', formed from co- (an intensive 'fully') and operire 'to cover'. In Old French this became descovrir, where the prefix des- reversed the action, so the literal sense was 'to uncover' or 'to remove the covering from something'. English took it in during the 1300s as 'discover', at first meaning to expose or reveal something that had been hidden, and only later did it broaden to the modern sense of finding or learning something for the first time. The present participle 'discovering' simply adds the -ing ending, and the spelling trap lives in that single -c- and single -v-: the word keeps the plain 'cover' inside it, so anyone who can spell 'cover' already holds the key.

How the word is built

• dis- (reversal, undo)
• cover (to cover, hide)
• -ing (present participle suffix)