Oversee
verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To survey, look at something in a wide angle. literally, transitive
- 2 watch and direct wordnet
- 3 To supervise, guide, review or direct the actions of a person or group. figuratively, transitive
"It is congress's duty to oversee the spending of federal funds."
- 4 To inspect, examine. transitive
"Gamekeepers oversee a hunting ground to see to the wildlife's welfare and look for poachers."
- 5 To fail to see; to overlook, ignore. obsolete, transitive
"Thereat the Elfe did blush in priuitee, / And turnd his face away; but she the same / Dissembled faire, and faynd to ouersee."
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- 6 To observe secretly or unintentionally. transitive
Example
More examples"Kotlin Island, an island 32 kilometres west of Saint Petersburg, was taken from Sweden in 1703 by Peter the Great, who then founded Kronstadt and left Pushkin's great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, the main character in Pushkin's unfinished book, Peter the Great's Negro, to oversee the construction. Kronstadt was also the birth place of Pyotr Kapitsa, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978."
Etymology
From Middle English overseen, ouverseen, from Old English ofersēon (“to observe, oversee; to overlook, neglect”), equivalent to over- + see.
More for "oversee"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.