Decry means to openly criticise or denounce something as harmful; descry means to spot or make out something far away. A critic decries a bad policy; a lookout descries a ship on the horizon. The two are historically related but now do very different jobs.
The core difference
Decry is about condemning something out loud; descry is about seeing something from a distance.
- decry — to denounce something as harmful, or blame it for ills: Critics decried the new policy as unfair to workers.
- descry — to catch sight of, especially from afar; to discern a distant or obscure object: From the hilltop she could just descry a ship on the horizon.
How to tell them apart
Decry and descry are doublets: both grew out of the same Old French word for crying out or proclaiming. Decry kept a negative, judging sense, so it's the word for publicly condemning something. Descry drifted toward the older sense of announcing a discovery, and from there to simply seeing something difficult to spot.
Because descry is rare in modern writing, it tends to trip people up more, since decry is by far the more common word and writers sometimes reach for descry by mistake when they mean decry, or vice versa.
