trouver.

Uncertain. Probably inherited from Old French trover, truver, from Vulgar Latin *tropāre (“to compose a poem”, > “to invent” > “to find”), from Latin tropus m (“figurative use of a word”); compare English trope. Alternatively from Latin turbō (“to disturb, perturb”) via the sense “to churn up water to drive fish into the net”, a widely-practiced method of fishing, this sense being attested in Sardinian turbare, trubare. This etymology may have phonological difficulties (namely 1) the lowering of u near a labial consonant – though lowering of short [ʊ] to [o] is regular in Italo-Western Romance –, 2) the metathesis of r – though it is directly attested in Sardinian – , and 3) the analogical preservation of b – though it can be explained by the metathesis being late), but it has the advantage that, like the descendants of afflō and captō in other Romance languages, it derives from hunting terminology.