Glance

How to spell glance

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce glance

What does glance mean?

1. verbTo look quickly and briefly at something.
2. nounA quick or brief look at something.

Glance in a sentence

• verb

  She would glance at her phone between meetings.

• noun

  A single glance at the figures told her the budget was wrong.

• verb

  He paused to glance over the contract before signing.

• noun

  He gave the room a sweeping glance as he entered.

Where does glance come from?

Language of origin: French

Glance entered English in the late 1300s from Old French, where the verb glacier meant 'to slip' or 'to glide', itself rooted in the Latin glacies, meaning 'ice', the very surface on which things slide. The earliest English sense kept this physical idea: a weapon or blow would 'glance' off a surface, slipping aside rather than striking square. From that notion of a quick, deflected movement the meaning drifted toward the eyes, so that by the 1500s a glance was a swift, sideways look that touches a thing only briefly before sliding away. The word kept company with 'glint' and 'gleam', and the overlapping flicker of light helped fix the sense of a fleeting visual moment. The spelling preserves the soft -ce ending typical of French borrowings, which is why it rhymes with 'dance' rather than ending in -se.

How the word is built

• glanc- (from Old French glacier, to slip or graze)
• -e