Scanning

How to spell scanning

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scanning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scanning mean?

1. verbLooking over or examining something carefully or quickly, point by point or area by area.
2. verbUsing a device or beam to sweep across and record an image, code, or signal.

Scanning in a sentence

• The security guard is scanning each bag before passengers board.

• The cashier was scanning the barcode when the till froze.

• She spent the morning scanning the contract for hidden clauses.

• The radiographer is scanning the patient's spine this afternoon.

Where does scanning come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base verb 'scan' descends from the Latin scandere, which literally meant 'to climb' and, by extension, 'to step'. Roman grammarians used scandere for marking the rising and falling steps of a line of poetry, so 'to scan' first entered English in the late 1300s as a technical term for measuring the metre of verse foot by foot. From the idea of moving carefully and methodically over each part of something, the meaning broadened to 'examine point by point', and later, perhaps influenced by the loose modern sense of a quick glance, it came to mean 'look over rapidly'. The twentieth century gave it fresh technical lives in radar, television and medicine, where a beam or sensor sweeps systematically across an area. The doubled 'n' in 'scanning' follows the regular English rule that a short stressed vowel ending in a single consonant doubles that consonant before -ing.

How the word is built

• scan (from Latin scandere, to climb or to mark the rhythm of verse)
• doubled n
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)