Survey

How to spell survey

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce survey

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does survey mean?

1. nounA set of questions, or a detailed examination, used to gather information about people, opinions, or land.
2. verbTo examine, measure, or look over something carefully in order to assess its condition or extent.

Survey in a sentence

• noun

  The company sent every customer a short survey about the new app.

• verb

  Engineers will survey the bridge for cracks before reopening it to traffic.

• noun

  Results from the national survey showed a steady rise in remote working.

• verb

  Researchers plan to survey a thousand voters about their spending habits.

Where does survey come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word reaches English from the Latin elements super, meaning 'over' or 'above', and videre, meaning 'to see', which together gave the Medieval Latin supervidere, 'to look over' or 'oversee'. It travelled through Old French as surveeir or surveoir, 'to look over' and 'to inspect', before settling into English in the early 1400s. The earliest English uses were administrative and legal: to survey was to examine land or property and to record its extent and value, which is why the measuring sense remains so strong today. The same videre root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'video', 'evident', and 'vision', all tied to seeing. The spelling trap is the quiet 'sur-' opening and the '-vey' ending, which sounds like 'vay' but is written with the same letters as 'they' and 'obey'.

How the word is built

• sur- (over, above, from Latin super)
• -vey (to look, from Latin videre 'to see')