Trouver

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To discover or locate something that has been sought after or desired; to find oneself in a particular situation; to recognize or ascertain the existence of something previously unknown
2. To come across something that is being searched for or needed; to arrive at a certain state or condition; to identify or pinpoint the presence of something not seen before
3. To unearth or detect an object or information that was previously elusive; to end up in a specific place or circumstance; to validate the reality of something that was hidden or overlooked

Etymology: "Trouver" is the French verb meaning "to find," and it is a close cousin of the English word "trover," a legal term for finding and keeping someone else's lost property. Both descend from the Late Latin "tropare," meaning "to compose or invent verses," a word that came from "tropus" (a figure of speech, or a musical turn). The shift from composing a tune to discovering something rests on an old idea: a troubadour "found" or invented a melody, and the verb gradually came to mean coming upon something by search or chance. The French verb developed through Old French "trouver," in which "to find" was already its main sense by the medieval period. English borrowed the related legal noun "trover" from Anglo-Norman law French, where it was used in lawsuits over goods that had been found and not returned, so the English legal word preserves a sense of "finding" that the French verb has lost in everyday use.

Synonyms: find, discover, locate

Antonyms: lose, misplace, miss