Other forms: glances, glancing, glanced
To glance is to look for a second and then look away. You glance at your watch under the table, glance in the mirror before pulling out, glance up when the door opens and back down again when it is nobody.
It nearly always takes a preposition — glance at, glance up, glance around, glance over your shoulder — and it is quick by definition, so a long glance is a contradiction. The noun behaves the same way: she gave him a glance; one glance told me the answer. Two fixed phrases are worth owning. At a glance means immediately, without study, as in you can see the totals at a glance; at first glance means before you look properly, as in at first glance it seems simple. There is an older physical sense too, where a bullet glances off a wall or a ball glances off the post: it strikes at an angle and skids away.
1verbglanceTo look at something quickly.
“He glanced at the clock and stood up.”
2nounquickA quick look.
“She gave the letter a single glance and folded it away.”
3verbstrikeTo strike something at an angle and bounce away from it.
“The stone glanced off the windscreen and left a chip.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Glance began in late Middle English as glenchen, and it had nothing to do with eyes. It described a blow that struck sideways, or a person twisting quickly out of the way. That skidding, off-at-an-angle motion is still there when a stone glances off a windscreen. The eye borrowed the movement: a look that touches something and slides straight off it.
Proto-Indo-European
*weng-
Middle English
glenchen — of a blow: to strike obliquely, glance; of a person: to turn quickly aside, dodge
English, today
glance
The verb is derived from Late Middle English glenchen (“of a blow: to strike obliquely, glance; of a person: to turn quickly aside, dodge”)glansen, glence, glench, glens, glanche, glauncen, glaunche, a blend of:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA