detect
Usage
What are other ways to say detect?
To detect implies becoming aware of something that had been obscure, secret, or concealed: to detect a flaw in reasoning. To ascertain is to verify facts by inquiry or analysis: to ascertain the truth about an event. To learn is to add to one's knowledge or information: to learn a language. The verb discover is used with objective clauses as a synonym of learn in order to suggest that the new information acquired is surprising to the learner: I discovered that she had been married before.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
By helping ants learn bait locations more quickly and recruit more nestmates, caffeine could increase how effectively poison spreads through a colony before the ants detect it.
From Science Daily • Apr. 18, 2026
That was a fake trail, said Lloyd’s List analysts who comb through data along with advanced analytics and human intelligence to detect spoofing.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 15, 2026
How to detect AI-composed text—and whether humans or software can tell the difference—is a subject of academic debate.
From Barron's • Apr. 14, 2026
The companies announced a program that will use Waymo’s self-driving cars to better detect potholes in the city.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 14, 2026
However, though scientists can detect black holes, they still haven’t spotted the zeros at their centers, since the ugly singularities are shielded by the event horizon.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
Vocabulary lists containing detect
Jim Burke's Academic Vocabulary List
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List 9
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