Browse

How to spell browse

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce browse

What does browse mean?

1. verbTo look through goods, pages, or content in a relaxed, unhurried way without a fixed purpose.
2. verbTo view pages on the internet or move through files on a computer.
3. verbOf animals, to feed on the leaves, twigs, and young shoots of trees and shrubs.

Browse in a sentence

• She liked to browse the bookshop for an hour after lunch.

• You can browse the company website from any phone.

• The deer come down at dusk to browse on the hedgerow.

• Customers can browse the catalogue before placing an order.

• The cafe lets visitors browse the internet on free wifi.

• Goats will browse on almost any bush in the field.

Where does browse come from?

Language of origin: French

The word entered English in the early 1500s from the Old French verb brouster (also spelled broster), which meant to nibble at buds, leaves, or young shoots. That French verb was built on the noun brost, meaning a sprout or tender shoot, a word of Germanic origin related to the idea of a bud breaking out. The earliest English sense was strictly agricultural: cattle, deer, and goats were said to browse when they cropped the leaves and twigs of bushes. From the eighteenth century the meaning softened into the gentle, unhurried way people pick over goods in a shop or pages in a book, by clear analogy with an animal nibbling here and there. In the late twentieth century the same image was carried over to scanning pages on a computer, giving us the web browser. The silent-looking single s and the final e are the spelling trap, since the word sounds like the unrelated plural brows (the eyebrows).

How the word is built

• brows- (from Old French brouster: to nibble shoots)
• -e