browse
/bɹaʊz/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.59 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To scan, to casually look through in order to find items of interest, especially without knowledge of what to look for beforehand.
verb
To move about while sampling, such as with food or products on display.
verb
To navigate through hyperlinked documents on a computer, usually with a browser.
Transitive verb
verb
To move about while eating parts of plants, especially plants other than pasture, such as shrubs or trees.
Intransitive verb
Example Sentences
- "I'm just browsing around."
- "I stopped in several bookstores to browse."
- "At Hampton Court the little flocks of visitors are not provided with an official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion upon the local antiquities."
- "The little room in which he found himself was plainly the bookseller's sanctum, and contained his own private library. Gilbert browsed along the shelves curiously. The volumes were mostly shabby and bruised; they had evidently been picked up one by one in the humble mangers of the second-hand vendor."
- "HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will."
- "Sheep ranged everywhere under the low cedars. They browsed with noses in the frost, and from all around came the tinkle of tiny bells on the curly-horned rams, and an endless variety of bleats."
Etymology
From Middle English browsen, from Old French brouster, broster (“to nibble off buds, sprouts, and bark; browse”), from brost (“a sprout, shoot, bud”), from a Germanic source, perhaps Frankish *brust (“shoot, bud”), from Proto-Germanic *brustiz (“bud, shoot”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰrews- (“to swell, sprout”). Cognate with Bavarian Bross, Brosst (“a bud”), Old Saxon brustian (“to sprout”). Doublet of brut, breast, and brush.