Sample Sentences for
discern
(editor-reviewed)

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    The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.  (source)
    discerns = notices or understands (something that is not obvious)
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    ...he could see nothing at all; then he began dimly to discern the green branches of pine trees, reaching through the mist.  (source)
    discern = see something that is not easy to see
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    the floor was covered in identical cups rolling in every direction, the original impossible to discern amongst them.  (source)
    discern = see a difference (notice which is which)
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  • •
    Ekwefi could now discern the figure of the priestess and her burden.  (source)
    discern = see or recognize
  • •
    When I mingled with other families I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was, and gratitude assisted the development of filial love.  (source)
    discerned = perceived (noticed)
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    Atticus kept us in fits that evening, gravely reading columns of print about a man who sat on a flagpole for no discernible reason, which was reason enough for Jem to spend the following Saturday aloft in the treehouse.  (source)
    discernible = understandable
  • •
    Your new acquaintance, for instance, discerns that the really big moment of his entire life occurred when he was a young man visiting a house in which there lived an old parson and his three daughters.†  (source)
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    The horizon is indiscernible in the dark, lost.†  (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in indiscernible means not and reverses the meaning of discernible. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
  • •
    Franny at that moment was gazing at a sunlit faded spot in the carpet over near the piano, her lips very discernibly moving.†  (source)
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    Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.†  (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in undiscernible means not and reverses the meaning of discernible. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
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    This morning on San Francisco Oriente, besides the clucking of several chickens and the growls of the hungry dog as he eyed the scavenging birds, there was only one other discernable sound.†  (source)
    standard suffix: The suffix "-able" means able to be. This is the same pattern you see in words like breakable, understandable, and comfortable.
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    The two kings, Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst, As presence did present them; him in eye, Still him in praise; and, being present both, 'Twas said they saw but one; and no discerner Durst wag his tongue in censure.†  (source)
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    8:5 Whoso keepeth the commandment shall feel no evil thing: and a wise man's heart discerneth both time and judgment.†  (source)
    standard suffix: Today, the suffix "-eth" is replaced by "-s", so that where they said "She discerneth" in older English, today we say "She discerns."
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