browse
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /bɹaʊz/
homophone: brows
rhymes: -aʊz
Forms: form: browses
form: browsing
form: browsed
form: browsed
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.
Senses: examples: text: I'm just browsing around.
text: I stopped in several bookstores to browse.
text: 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.
ref: 1878, Henry James, An International Episode:
text: 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.
ref: 1919, Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop, New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, →OCLC:
glosses: To scan, to casually look through in order to find items of interest, especially without knowledge of what to look for beforehand.
glosses: To move about while sampling, such as with food or products on display.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1990 November 12, Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project”, in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: To navigate through hyperlinked documents on a computer, usually with a browser.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1910, Zane Grey, The Heritage of the Desert:
text: Also, when planting to provide a source of browse for wintering deer and elk, protect seedlings from browsing during the first several years; an electric fence enclosure can offer effective protection.
ref: 1997, Kent Grant, “Wildlife Values of Conservation”, in Colorado State Forest Service, archived from the original on 11 Jun 2010:
glosses: To move about while eating parts of plants, especially plants other than pasture, such as shrubs or trees.
raw_tags: of an animal
examples: text: The fields between / Are dewy-fresh, brows'd by deep-udder'd kine, […]
ref: 1842, Alfred Tennyson, “The Gardener’s Daughter; or, The Pictures”, in Poems. […], volume II, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 21:
text: “If fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how many of them eats with their heads pointed the same direction?”
ref: 1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC:
glosses: To feed on, as pasture; to pasture on; to graze.
Derived terms: browsability
browsable
browseable
browser
browsewood
browsewrap
browsy
nonbrowsing
overbrowse
unbrowsed