scout: [14] Etymologically, a scout is someone who ‘listens’. For the word goes back ultimately to Latin auscultāre ‘listen’, a derivative of the same base that produced Latin auris ‘ear’ (source of English aural [19] and distantly related to English ear). This passed into Old French as escouter ‘listen’ (its modern descendant is écouter), which English adopted as the verb scout, meaning ‘look about, spy’. The noun, from the French derivative escoute, followed in the 15th century. => aural, ear