''purview'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260917002803-00-⌔

purview - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

purview (plural purviews)

• (law) The enacting part of a statute.
• (law) The scope of a statute.
• Scope or range of interest or control.
  • ✤ Synonym: responsibility
  • ✤ Will it be said that the fundamental principles of the Confederation were not within the purview of the convention, and ought not to have been varied?¹
  • ✤ Rhetorical relations have truth conditional effects that contribute to meaning but lie outside the purview of compositional semantics.²
  • ✤ Several air marshals have asked Congress to remove the program from T.S.A.’s purview and entrust it to a different agency, like Customs and Border Protection or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.³
  • ✤ It was 2015 when Jain—whose purview includes commissioning new series, acquiring the rights to foreign hits, and publicly answering for any perceived misdeeds of ITV—set out to overhaul the tepidly received Celebrity Love Island, a 12-person British popularity contest and ostensible matchmaker that disappeared after two seasons.⁴
• Range of understanding.
  • ✤ Our company were noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system.⁵

Etymology

From Middle English purveu (“proviso”), from Anglo-Norman purveu est (“it is provided”), or purveu que (“provided that”) (statutory language), from Old French porveü (“provided”), past participle of porveoir (“to provide”), from Latin prōvideō (see provide). Influenced by view and its etymological antecedents.

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ˈpɜː(ɹ)vjuː/
• Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-09-17.

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Footnotes

1. 1788, James Madison, “The Right of the Convention to Frame such a Constitution”, in The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, page 255: ↩

2. 2003, Nicholas Asher, Alex Lascarides, Logics of Conversation, page 7: ↩

3. 2018 April 25, Ron Nixon, “Scandals and Investigations, but Few Arrests, for Air Marshals Program”, in The New York Times ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

4. 2022 June 2, Anna Peele, “Inside ‘Love Island,’ From the Tragic Suicide Deaths to New Mental Health Protocols”, in Vanity Fair ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

5. 1922, Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China, page 18: ↩