The word 'descry' is correct and can be used in written English.
It means to catch sight of or discover by careful observation or scrutiny. Example: As I gazed out the window, I could descry a glimmer of light in the distance, indicating that our long-awaited rescue had finally arrived.
Preoccupied as they usually are with the history of the church as an institution and with the life and thought of the leaders of the church, the documentary sources of knowledge about medieval Christianity make it difficult for the social historian to descry "the religion of the common man" during this period.
"To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld," wrote Mr. Danto in his oft-quoted 1964 essay "The Artworld".
Was the distribution of shot times entirely random, or were there any local or global patterns to descry: longies with longies, middies alternating with shorties, etc.? Plot synopsis: Movies today are, on average, much pinker than the films of half a century ago.
If you look across the hill tops that meet the Northern sky, Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry; And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy vail aside, And floats aloft our spangled flag, in glory and in pride, And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour: We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!
The following year police raided an exhibition of Lawrence's paintings and seized every canvas on which they could descry any wisp of pubic hair.
It is, as Wodehouse said, difficult to descry the bluebird.
After World War I, there was a distinct yearning for new possibilities of salvation among war-ridden Europeans, dimly descried in Asia, in Russia, or in America, and travel literature assumed a metaphysical and semireligious significance.
Its director Samantha Maher this week descried the effort to withdraw the murder charges against the brothers.
Few before the crash descried the seeds of disaster in banks' reliance on highly leveraged instruments.
Among the shared limitations are fickleness, a preoccupation with descrying the will of the majority in order to manipulate it or pander to it, and a concern with the accumulation or protection of power and profit.
Revenge of the sort we are asked to fear is that thing that happens in the night, with rocks flying, houses looted, and graffiti descrying the carried-interest rate.
