Browser

How to spell browser

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce browser

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does browser mean?

1. nounA software program used to find and view pages on the internet.
2. nounA person who looks casually through goods or books without intending to buy.

Browser in a sentence

• The new website loads quickly in every modern browser.

• The bookshop welcomed every browser with comfortable chairs and free coffee.

• Clearing the cache in your browser can fix many display problems.

• As a casual browser, she rarely left the market with anything in her bag.

Where does browser come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows out of the verb 'browse', which English took from the Old French 'brouster', meaning to nibble or feed on the buds and young shoots of plants. That French verb rested on the noun 'broust', a bud or tender shoot, a word of Germanic origin. By the 1500s English speakers used 'browse' for animals cropping leaves, and by the 1800s the sense had shifted to people leisurely looking over books or goods without a fixed purpose, much as a grazing animal samples here and there. Adding the agent suffix '-er' gave 'browser', first a person who browses in a shop or library, then in the early 1990s the now dominant meaning: the software program that lets you graze freely across pages on the web. The spelling keeps the silent 'e' of 'browse' before the suffix, and the tricky part is the 's', which sounds like a 'z' yet is written with an 's'.

How the word is built

• browse (to graze, to look casually)
• -er (agent noun: one who, or thing that, does the action)