Scanned

How to spell scanned

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scanned

What does scanned mean?

1. verbExamined, read, or captured something by looking over it carefully or by passing a sensor or beam across it.

Scanned in a sentence

• The cashier scanned each item before bagging the groceries.

• She quickly scanned the report for any obvious errors.

Where does scanned come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base verb 'scan' descends from the Latin scandere, which literally meant 'to climb' and, in the world of poetry, came to mean climbing through the metrical feet of a line. Late Middle English borrowed it first as a term in prosody: to scan a verse was to mark its rhythm and count its stresses, around the 1300s and 1400s. From this careful, measured reading the meaning broadened, so that by the 1600s scanning could mean examining something closely and systematically, and later, almost the opposite, glancing over it quickly. In the twentieth century technology gave us the radar, medical, and digital senses, where a beam or sensor sweeps methodically across a surface, a clear echo of that original idea of moving across in steps. The past tense 'scanned' takes a doubled n because 'scan' ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant with stress on that syllable, the same rule that turns 'plan' into 'planned'; remembering that pattern is the key to not writing 'scaned'.

How the word is built

• scan (from Latin scandere: to climb, then to scan verse)
• -n- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)