Other forms: browsing, browsed, browses
To browse is to look through things with no fixed goal — a shop, a shelf, a website — picking up whatever catches your eye. Twenty minutes in a bookshop with no title in mind, or a slow scroll down a menu you already know by heart.
You browse a shop, browse the shelves, browse through a magazine, or just browse: 'Just browsing, thanks' is the standard answer to a shop assistant, and it means you are not buying. There is a noun — have a browse — and there is the browser you open to reach the internet. The older meaning is still alive in the countryside: deer and goats browse, meaning they eat leaves, shoots and twigs off trees and bushes, while cattle graze on grass. Browsing is unhurried and undirected, which is the whole point of it; if you know exactly what you want, you are searching, not browsing.
1verbbrowseTo look through goods, pages or files with no fixed goal.
“We browsed the market stalls for an hour and bought nothing.”
synonyms: skim, leaf through
2verbanimalsOf animals: to feed on the leaves, shoots and twigs of trees and bushes.
“Deer come out at dusk to browse along the edge of the wood.”
3noununhurriedAn unhurried look through something.
“I had a browse through the second-hand shelves while she queued.”
Browse came through Middle English browsen from Old French brouster, 'to nibble off buds, sprouts and bark', built on brost, 'a sprout, shoot, bud'. That runs back through Frankish and Proto-Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'to swell, sprout'. So a shopper drifting along a shelf is doing, in name at least, what a goat does to a hedge.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰrews- — to swell, sprout
Proto-Germanic
*brustiz — bud, shoot
Frankish
*brust — shoot, bud
Old French
brouster
Middle English
browsen
English, today
browse
Built from
From Middle English browsen, from Old French brouster, broster (“to nibble off buds, sprouts, and bark; browse”), from brost (“a sprout, shoot, bud”), from a gem source, perhaps Frankish brust (“shoot, bud”), from Proto-Germanic brustiz (“bud, shoot”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰrews- (“to swell, sprout”). Cognate with bar Bross, Brosst (“a bud”), Old Saxon brustian (“to sprout”). a doublet of brut and breast and brush.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA