Prospect

How to spell prospect

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce prospect

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does prospect mean?

1. nounThe possibility or likelihood of a future event, often something hoped for or anticipated.
2. nounA person regarded as a potential customer, recruit, or candidate for something.
3. verbTo explore an area in search of valuable mineral deposits such as gold or oil.

Prospect in a sentence

• noun

  The prospect of a long commute made her reconsider the job offer.

• noun

  The sales team called every prospect on the new contact list.

• verb

  The company hired a geologist to prospect for copper in the remote valley.

• noun

  There is little prospect of the weather improving before the weekend.

• noun

  The coach described the young striker as a serious prospect for the first team.

• verb

  Settlers would prospect along the riverbanks hoping to find gold.

Where does prospect come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin prospectus, meaning 'a view' or 'an outlook', the past participle of prospicere, which literally meant 'to look forward' or 'to look out into the distance', formed from pro- 'forward' and specere 'to look'. English took it up in the early 1400s, at first for a literal scene laid out before the eye, the sweep of landscape you could survey from a high vantage point. From that physical sense of looking ahead, the meaning naturally drifted toward looking ahead in time, so a prospect became a thing expected or hoped for in the future. The same specere root sits inside a whole family of familiar words such as spectator, inspect and respect, all of which involve looking in some way. The verb sense used by gold and mineral hunters, to search the ground for valuable deposits, is a later development that revives the original idea of carefully looking over a stretch of land.

How the word is built

• pro- (forward, ahead)
• spect (look, from Latin specere 'to look')