What is Reveal?

The Latin word develāre, which can be translated as “remove the veil”, came to our language as unveiling. This verb refers to making known something that was hidden or that, until then, was unknown.

For example: “The chronicler announced that tomorrow he will be in charge of revealing the name of the famous actress who is pregnant”, “I am not going to reveal who told me, but I found out that you are dating my ex-boyfriend”, “The investigators They are trying to reveal what happened to the missing businessman. ”

Unveiling, which can also be referred to as unveiling, is linked to discovering a thing and making it public. Let us suppose that a journalist carries out an investigation on the development of a public work and discovers that the company that won a tender paid bribes to be chosen. Given this discovery, he makes copies of the documents that demonstrate the corruption and records witnesses who give their testimony about the events. The journalist, once he has gathered everything necessary, is in charge of revealing the facts and presenting the material on his television program. This means that this press man informs society about bribes. See Abbreviation Finder for acronyms related to Reveal.

An autopsy, on the other hand, can reveal the causes of a doubtful death. If a man is found dead on the street, with no visible signs of beatings or injuries, it is impossible to explain what happened to him. By performing an autopsy, you can find out if the person had a heart attack or if he was poisoned, to name two possibilities. The autopsy, therefore, is responsible for revealing the reason for death.

Although in all the examples presented so far the verb reveal is used as a synonym for reveal, the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy does not propose it in the same way, but only gives it one of the two possible meanings of the latter: “remove the veil with which someone has covered something”, as can happen with objects that have been protected or hidden from public view. In addition, this meaning of revealing is valid only in Latin America.

Let’s see some example sentences: «The mayor unveiled the commemorative plaque, after which the public began to applaud and the photographers, to immortalize the moment», «Since he entered the room, the silence was absolute, until a series of sighs broke it in unison when the face was finally revealed «, «The mystery seemed to have come to an end when the agent revealed the portrait that had been hidden in the attic».

In Spain, this verb is used with the connotation of bringing something to light or discovering the unknown and there is no space to unveil. The situation in Latin American countries is very different, since there are many regionalisms that mix terms, expressions and conjugations of their mother tongue with their own elements, giving rise to a very wide sound and orthographic range.

Something similar occurs with the verb decode, which the RAE immediately refers to decode, although in this case it does not mention an Americanism. The prefix dis- serves to denote inversion or negation of the meaning of the simple word to which it is placed before; in the case of unveiling, we can understand that “a veil is removed”, just as decoding denotes the inversion of a coding process and uncovering, the action of removing a coat.

The reason that in some regions the letter S of this prefix tends to disappear may be linked to phonetic issues specific to each accent, as well as the influence of certain foreign languages, something very typical of Latin American history.

Reveal