Surveil

//sɚˈveɪl// verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To keep someone or something under surveillance. US, transitive

    "The plaintiff also stresses that the store as a whole, and the customer exits especially, were closely surveilled. Alexandre of London v. Indem. Ins. Co., 182 F. Supp. 748, 750 (United States District Court for the District of Columbia) (1960), cited in Bryan A. Garner. A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2nd ed., 2001) p. 861"

  2. 2
    keep under surveillance wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
followsurveytwig

Example

More examples

"The plaintiff also stresses that the store as a whole, and the customer exits especially, were closely surveilled. Alexandre of London v. Indem. Ins. Co., 182 F. Supp. 748, 750 (United States District Court for the District of Columbia) (1960), cited in Bryan A. Garner. A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2nd ed., 2001) p. 861"

Etymology

1903. Back-formation from surveillance (but compare also French surveiller and the variant surveille).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.