Surveying

How to spell surveying

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce surveying

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does surveying mean?

1. nounThe profession or practice of measuring and mapping land, boundaries and features.
2. verbLooking over or carefully examining something in its entirety.

Surveying in a sentence

• noun

  He studied surveying at college before joining the engineering firm.

• verb

  She stood at the window, surveying the garden for storm damage.

• noun

  The boundary dispute was settled by professional surveying of the property.

• verb

  The manager spent the morning surveying staff opinions about the new policy.

Where does surveying come from?

Language of origin: French

This word descends from the verb 'survey', which English took from Anglo-French 'surveier' and Old French 'surveoir', meaning to look over or oversee. That French verb was built on the Latin prefix 'super-', meaning 'over' or 'above', joined to the verb 'videre', meaning 'to see'; so the literal sense was 'to see over' something. When the word arrived in English in the 1400s it carried this idea of casting an eye over an area or scene to inspect it. From that general sense of overseeing came the specialised meaning of carefully measuring and mapping land, and the '-ing' form 'surveying' became the standard name for that profession. The same Latin 'videre' lies behind familiar relatives such as 'video', 'vision' and 'evident', and remembering that the middle of the word holds a 'vey' (from 'veoir', to see) helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• sur- (from sur-, over)
• vey (from veoir/videre, to see)
• -ing (noun/verb ending)