Other forms: grazing, grazed, grazes
To graze is what cattle and sheep do all day: move slowly across a field with their heads down, eating the grass as they go. Horses grazing on a hillside; a flock grazing the common behind the church.
A farmer can graze animals too — he grazes sheep on rented land — and the land they use is grazing. Then there is a second sense that feels like a different word altogether: to graze is to scrape the skin off, so you graze your knee falling off a bike, and the raw pink mark left behind is a graze. Push that further and graze means to touch something lightly in passing: the bullet grazed his shoulder, the wing mirror grazed the wall. There is an informal use for people who eat like cattle, picking at things all day instead of sitting down to a meal.
1verbgrazeOf animals, to eat grass growing in a field.~51%
“Cows were grazing on the far side of the stream.”
2verbpastureTo put animals on land to eat the grass there.~43%
“He grazes forty sheep on the hill above the farm.”
synonyms: pasture
3verbscrapeTo scrape the surface of the skin, breaking it slightly.~2%
“She fell on the path and grazed both knees.”
4nounabrasionA shallow wound where the skin has been scraped.~2%
“It was only a graze, but it bled for a while.”
5verbbrushTo touch something lightly while passing it.~2%
“The van grazed the gatepost on its way out.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Graze is a doublet of grass — the same old word worn into a second shape. What the animals do is named straight after the thing they are eating.
Middle English
grasen — to feed with grass
English, today
graze
From Middle English grasen (“to feed with grass”). a doublet of grass.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA