detect

present singular third person detects · participle present detecting · participle past detected · past detected

1. transitiveTo discover or notice, especially by careful search, examination, or probing.

   On entering the room, I immediately detected the smell of gas.

   3 more examples

   The forensic examiners detected tiny traces of the poison on the suspect's gloves.

   Cantharidin, although readily decomposed by chemical agents, is so permanent in the body that it has been detected in the corpse of a cat eighty-four days after death.

   1885, Alexander Wynter Blyth, Poisons, Their Effects and Detection: A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts, volume I, New York: William Wood and Co., page 430

   Diesel maintenance schedules are benefiting from work done on the magnificent Hilger & Watts electronic spectrograph for oil analysis, which detects minute quantities of metals in samples of used lubricating oil; [...].

   1960 June, “Talking of Trains: New B.R. research laboratory”, in Trains Illustrated, page 329

2. informalintransitiveTo work or solve cases as a detective.

   Let me introduce myself: Mike MacAdam, hotel detective. / H-how d-’you do? / Mind if I begin detecting?

   1978, Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, Michael Turner, transl., Tintin in America (The Adventures of Tintin), Egmont, published 2012, →ISBN, page 45

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   Parker would in all likelihood have done so; he was paid to detect and to do nothing else, and neither his natural gifts nor his education (at Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School) prompted him to stray into side-tracks at the beck of an ill-regulated imagination.

   1926, Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (Lord Peter Wimsey; 2), T. Fisher Unwin, →ISBN, page 105

   In a detective story, a detective detects; an active effort is made to determine who committed a given crime, and detecting the identity of a criminal could not be done until there were detectives.

   1991, Hillary Waugh, Hillary Waugh's Guide to Mysteries & Mystery Writing Novel, Writer's Digest Books, →ISBN, page 11

   That aversion is tested when he teams up with Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds), his father's detecting partner, after the father appears to have been killed in an accident.

   2019 May 9, Ben Kenigsberg, “'Pokémon Detective Pikachu' Review: A Cat and (Electric) Mouse Game”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 17 Dec 2022

1. not comparableobsoleteDetected.