vbl. sb. [f. SPY v.] The action of the verb, in various senses.
1338. R. Brunne, Chron. (1810), 338. Sir Jon de Waleis taken was in a pleyn, Þorgh spiyng of Norreis.
1398. Trevisa, Barth. De P. R., VIII. xxviii. (Bodl. MS.). Liȝt … destroieth fals waitinges and spyinges.
c. 1430. Syr Gener. (Roxb.), 9138. But thei be armed in al maners,… For auenture of ony spiyng.
1495. Trevisa’s Barth. De P. R., XIV. xiii. 473. Mount Fasga is the hyll of spienge, of syghte, and of byholdynge.
1523. Ld. Berners, Froiss., I. liii. 75. None coulde yssue out without spyeng.
a. 1568. Ascham, Scholem., II. (Arb.), 148. The spying of this fault now is not the curiositie of English eyes.
1611. Cotgr., Speculation,… a viewing, watching, or spying out from a high place.
1883. E. Lennox Peel, in Longm. Mag., Nov., 72. The Hill of Badeney … on ordinary days gave us our first vantage-ground for spying.
1907. Athenæum, 6 July, 6/2. His suspicions and spyings and petty meddlings certainly had required extraordinary patience.
b. attrib., as spying-hole, -mission, -place.
1791. Bentham, Panopt., I. Postscr. 97. A thin partition … with blinded spying-holes running in the line level with the Inspector’s eye.
1848. W. K. Kelly, trans. L. Blanc’s Hist. Ten Y., II. 448. Confident … that there was no truth in the spying mission attributed to Conseil.
1894. Weyman, Man in Black, 79. The closet was a spying-place, and these were Judas-holes.
