Oversight

How to spell oversight

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce oversight

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does oversight mean?

1. nounAn unintended failure to notice or do something; a careless omission.
2. nounThe act of watching over and managing a process, project, or organisation.

Oversight in a sentence

• The missing signature was a simple oversight on the form.

• The committee provides financial oversight of the charity.

• Due to an oversight, the invoice was never sent to the client.

• Regulatory oversight of the banks was tightened after the crisis.

Where does oversight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Oversight is a compound built from the Germanic prefix over-, meaning 'above' or 'across', and sight, which comes from the Old English siht or gesiht, the act or power of seeing, ultimately tied to the verb seon, 'to see'. The word appeared in Middle English and from the start carried two very different threads. One thread followed the idea of watching over something, giving us the sense of supervision or management, much as a person standing above a scene can keep an eye on it. The other thread, surprisingly, came from the idea of looking over something and therefore missing it, which produced the sense of an accidental omission or mistake. This is why a single word can mean both 'careful supervision' and 'a careless slip', a contradiction that still occasionally trips up readers today. Both halves of the word are plain, common English, which is what keeps the spelling reassuringly regular.

How the word is built

• over- (above, watching over)
• sight (from Old English siht: the act of seeing)