descry

In ancient Egypt, seekers after spiritual guidance could spend a night in incubation, which was a special institutionalised sleep undertaken in the temples of the gods precisely in order to descry meaning in the dark.

From The Guardian ● Dec. 15, 2018

What yonder twinkling azure orb do I descry?

From Washington Post ● Apr. 29, 2015

Still, there are trends and changes to descry: To the usual surprising degree, great minds are thinking alike, small ones running in the same gutter.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 13, 2011

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.?

From New York Times ● Mar. 1, 2010

We stood side by side there in the near-dark; I could descry the fear in his eyes, the discomfort in the mouth.

From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson

And on this Aeneas descries from sea a mighty forest.

From The Aeneid of Virgil by Virgil

He flies swifter than the wind, when once he descries a strange hilt in his weaponless hand.

From The Aeneid of Virgil by Virgil

Upon those pages she descries Her passion's faithful counterpart, Fruit of the yearnings of the heart.

From Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] A Romance of Russian Life in Verse by Henry Spalding

His heart feels a fresh bound; he feels neither strain of limb nor scantness of breath, and, searching as he runs, he descries before him in the plain the deceitful sire alone.

From Hawaiian Folk Tales A Collection of Native Legends by Thomas G. (Thomas George) Thrum

"Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes, And weakest his who best descries."

From The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed by Hugh Miller

Once the employer of 500 people, the mill is a keyhole through which most of Dundee’s history can be descried.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 30, 2022

A truly fascinating man, Angleton was a devoted student of the matchless British literary critic William Empson, who descried, in the densely metaphoric poems of Donne and Shakespeare, patterns of subtle contradiction, self-reference, and ambiguity.

From The New Yorker ● Aug. 26, 2019

Presently they descried people, naked, and the Admiral landed in the boat, which was armed, along with Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and Vincent Yanez his brother, captain of the Nina.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2019

Police Chief Murphy Paul descried the footage as “shocking to the conscience,” even as he emphasized that it does not “tell the whole story of the investigation.”

From Slate ● Mar. 31, 2018

There it seemed to Frodo that he descried far off, floating as it were on a shadowy sea, the high dim tops and broken pinnacles of old towers forlorn and dark.

From "The Two Towers" by J. R. R. Tolkien

My colleague Jessica Winter does have a helpful hint, though, for descrying Trump’s fanciest, sneakiest adviser:

From Slate ● May 2, 2017

Say you were descrying the future TV of 2000, 20 years ago.

From Time Magazine Archive

The moment that it was light enough to see, I scrambled up on the wreckage and took a long look round, in the hope of descrying a sail, but the horizon was bare.

From The Castaways by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale

On the 11th of September the inhabitants of the city were overjoyed, in descrying from the towers of the city, in the distance, the approaching banners of the Polish and German army.

From The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power by John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

"It must be he's at his dinner," said Jimmy at my elbow, descrying these movements with a vision that appeared to be equal to mine plus the field-glasses.

From In Mr. Knox's Country by Martin Ross