- invent
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2 Invent, create, discover are comparable terms frequently confused in the sense of to bring into being something new.Invent (see also CONTRIVE) may stress fabrication of something new through the exercise of the imagination{
a poet is a maker, as the word signifies: and he who cannot make, that is, invent, hath his name for nothing— Dryden
}{his fund of knowledge seemed inexhaustible, for what he didn't know he invented— Alvin Redman
}{the little stories she had invented for her two small daughters— Current Biog.
}or it may stress the fabrication of something new and often useful as a result of study and thought; the word therefore often presupposes labor and ingenuity rather than inspiration{if the Semitic letters were not derived from Egypt they must have been invented by the Phoenicians— Clodd
}However, invent often stresses the finding, as well as the bringing into being, of something new or hitherto unknown as the result of mental effort{physicists had to save the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum ... a new particle had to be invented—Marshak
}{she was tired of inventing means for making the days and nights pleasant and capriciously variable for others— Van Vechten
}Create stresses a causing of something to exist; it not only implies previous nonexistence but it often suggests an evoking of something into being out of, or as if out of, nothing (as by fiat, by an act of the will, or by inspiration){God created the heaven and the earth— Gen 1:1
}{the law creates rights
}{the king created an earldom for his favorite
}{to this strange force within him, to this power that created his works of art, there was nothing to do but submit— Huxley
}{I do not believe that a sense of justice is innate, but I have been astonished to see how quickly it can be created— Russell
}{modern science, which created this dilemma, is also capable of solving it— Bliven b. 1889
}Discover (see also DISCOVER 2 ; REVEAL) presupposes both the existence of and a lack of knowledge about something; the term therefore implies the finding of such a thing, often as the result of mental or physical effort (as by exploration, investigation, or experiment){remains of this Belgic culture have often been discovered— Jacquetta & Christopher Hawkes
}{men who were fighting Communism long before McCarthy ever discovered it— Davis
}{William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood
}Thus, in discriminative use one invents processes or ways of doing something, as well as instruments, tools, implements, or machines, but one discovers things which exist but have not yet been known (as lands, stars, or natural laws){Newton invented the differential and the integral calculus . . . and discovered the laws of motion— Darrow
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
