detection
- 1The act or process of uncovering or finding out something new, hidden, or disguised.
Improved detection methods allow scientists to identify diseases at much earlier stages.
The detection of the fraud took investigators several months of careful work.
Similardiscovery, identification, uncovering, exposure, recognition
Note
The everyday sense: a learned borrowing from Latin dētēctiōnem, which English now reads simply as detect plus -ion. It often follows avoid, as in Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931), where a murderer wishes "to avoid detection." It can also mean noticing a hidden quality rather than a hidden deed. The American novelist Winston Churchill's The Celebrity (1897) speaks of a "lack of detection of his promise."
- 2The act or process of finding an electrical signal within a carrier wave.
The receiver's detection of the modulated signal depends on a stable carrier frequency.
Engineers improved detection by adding a more sensitive diode to the circuit.
Similardemodulation
Oppositemodulation
Note
Radio engineers mean something more mechanical: pulling the information back out of a modulated carrier, the job a demodulator does. In early radio this meant rectifying the carrier to extract the audio it carried. Unlike the everyday sense, nothing concealed is being uncovered. The signal is expected to be there, and detection is the work of recovering it cleanly.
- 3The public exposure of concealed information about a crime or heresy; an accusation.
Similaraccusation
Note
In this obsolete sense, exposing a concealed crime or heresy amounted to accusing someone of it. In older texts, read the word as close to accusation, with the stress on making the hidden thing public against a person. Modern writing keeps only the plain "finding out" sense. A detection of fraud today is a discovery, not a charge. Where a charge is meant, accusation is the safe word.
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Origin
A learned borrowing from Latin "dētēctiōnem"; by surface analysis it can be understood as "detect" plus the suffix "-ion".