Noun: spy
Sample Sentences
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The dead leap at the throat, destroy
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The meaning of the day; dark forms
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Have scaled your walls, and spies betray
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Old secrets to amorphous swarms. [1941, Theodore Roethke, “Feud”, in Open House, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →OCLC; republished in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, London: Faber and Faber […], 1968, →OCLC, page 4:]
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Even without hovering drones, a lurking assassin, a thumping score and a denouement, the real-life story of Edward Snowden, a rogue spy on the run, could be straight out of the cinema. But, as with Hollywood, the subplots and exotic locations may distract from the real message: America’s discomfort and its foes’ glee. [2013 June 29, “Travels and travails”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 55:]
Nouns inflected like spy
clitoridectomy,
royal jelly,
whoopsy,
surrogacy,
urinary,
rastrography,
renoscopy,
sourtop blueberry,
forcible entry,
superficiary,
lipidosity,
potability,
phonography,
hyperproperty,
greenery,
conjugality,
ring singularity,
Brittany,
ignobility,
obscurity, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
1. From Middle English spien, aphetic variant of earlier espien (“to espy”), from Old French espier (“to spy”), from Frankish *spehōn (“to spy”), from Proto-Germanic *spehōną (“to see, look”), from Proto-Indo-European *speḱ- (“to look”). Akin to German spähen (“to spy”), Dutch spieden (“to spy”).
2. The noun displaced native Old English sċēawere (literally “watcher”), which was also the word for "mirror." In this sense, the verb displaced Old English sċēawian, which was also the word for "to watch" and became the Modern English word show.
3. Distant cognate vie PIE with Latin speculātor, Ancient Greek κατάσκοπος (katáskopos).
4. Compare typologically Russian согляда́тай (sogljadátaj) (akin to гляде́ть (gljadétʹ)). See: Latin Nouns '
speculātor'.
Verbs referencing "spy"
Italian Nouns
spia, Galician Nouns
espía.