Explorer

How to spell explorer

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce explorer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does explorer mean?

1. nounA person who travels into or investigates unfamiliar regions or subjects in order to learn about them.

Explorer in a sentence

• The polar explorer kept a detailed journal of each day's march across the ice.

• As a deep-sea explorer, she spent years mapping coral reefs no one had charted.

Where does explorer come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb explorare, which meant 'to search out' or 'to investigate'. The most colourful theory holds that explorare was built from ex- 'out' and plorare 'to cry out', perhaps from the shouts of hunters who flushed out game or the cries used to signal what scouts had found, so the literal sense was something like 'to cry out after searching'. From the idea of scouting and investigating, the verb 'explore' entered English in the late 1500s through French explorer, and the agent noun 'explorer', meaning a person who travels to discover unknown places, followed soon after. The same plorare root sits behind the much rarer 'deplore' and 'implore', words that all share that ancient sense of crying out. For spelling, it helps to remember the clean Latin frame: the prefix ex-, the -plor- core, and the everyday agent ending -er.

How the word is built

• ex- (out, forth)
• plor (from Latin plorare: to cry out)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)