descry

The superior power of machine learning, Cohen explains, is that it can descry patterns in what traditional sensory methods dismissed as noise.

From The Guardian ● May 23, 2018

What yonder twinkling azure orb do I descry?

From Washington Post ● Apr. 29, 2015

You will descry shades of H. Potter and of "Grimm," which this series predates.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 12, 2012

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

Dimly through the mists they could descry the long arm of the mountains rising on their left.

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

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

From The Aeneid of Virgil by Virgil

As in search for Turnus he bent his glance this way and that round the separate ranks, he descries the city free from all this warfare, unpunished and unstirred.

From The Aeneid of Virgil by Virgil

It is a superficial judgment that descries nothing but insincerity in the unvarying suavity of a well-bred manner; that regards the conventional code of behavior as merely a device for rendering social life artificial.

From Etiquette by Agnes H. Morton

Olimpia awakes, and, finding herself alone, hurries to the beach, and then ascends a rock, whence she descries, by light of the moon, the departing sail of her lover.

From History of Roman Literature from its Earliest Period to the Augustan Age. Volume I by John Dunlop

The huntsman hears the rustling noise, And through half-eaten leaves descries His branching horns, the pack recalls, And merited the creature falls To his ingratitude a prey.

From Aesop, in Rhyme Old Friends in a New Dress by Marmaduke Park

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

"But these people—" She looked up and down the long room with misty eyes, like one dimly descrying a throng.

From The Open Question a tale of two temperaments by Elizabeth Robins

Edward and his friend walked up and down, east and west, north and south, in hopes of descrying the travellers in the remotest distance.

From The Doll and Her Friends or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina by Hablot K. Browne

When in a wild condition they would snort so loudly through the nostrils on descrying an enemy that they could be heard at a distance of five hundred yards.

From Pioneers in Canada by E. Wallcousins