sleuth

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Is there a "scare" in the word "scarify?" Scare up the answer 
to this and other disputes in our Concise Usage Dictionary.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?conusg.htm&6
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The Word of the Day for October 26 is:

sleuth   \SLOOTH\   verb 
    *intransitive verb : to act as a detective : search for information
     transitive verb : to search for and discover

Example sentence:
     After several employees complained of nausea, a shrewd bit of medical 
sleuthing turned up the culprit: a bacterium in the drinking water.

Did you know?
     "They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Those canine tracks in 
Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock 
Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer. It was a case of art imitating 
etymology. When Middle English speakers first borrowed "sleuth" from Old Norse, 
the term referred to "the track of an animal or person." In Scotland, a 
"sleuthhound" was a bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from 
justice. In 19th century U.S. English, "sleuthhound" became an epithet for a 
detective and was soon shortened to "sleuth." From there, it was only a short 
leap to turning "sleuth" into a verb describing what a sleuth does.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.