Other forms: scans, scanned, scanning
To scan is to run your eyes over something quickly, hunting for one thing and skipping the rest. You scan the departures board for your flight, scan a menu for something without mushrooms, scan a list of names for your own.
Machines scan as well, and that is where the noun comes from. A scanner reads the barcode at the till, an office scanner turns a paper document into a file, and a hospital scanner produces a scan — a picture of the inside of your body, which is what most people mean by the bare word. Pregnancy has its own, the twelve-week scan. The verb pulls in two directions and English keeps one word for both: scan the crowd for a face is fast and choosy, scan the whole sky every four nights is slow and complete. Spelling trap — the n doubles: scanned, scanning, scanner.
1verblookTo look over something quickly to find the part you want.~2%
“He scanned the timetable for the next train home.”
2nounscanA picture of the inside of the body made by a machine.~44%
“The scan showed the bone was cracked.”
3verbpassTo pass a document or a picture through a machine that copies it into a computer.~12%
“Scan the receipt and email it to me.”
4verbexamineTo examine every part of something in turn.~42%
“The telescope scans the whole sky every four nights.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 107 sentences found in the wild and placed 93 of them on a sense (14 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Scan began in poetry. Latin scandere meant to scan a line of verse, and under it sits scandō, to climb — the foot rising and falling, step after step, as you count the beats across a line. English had it that way first: Middle English scanne meant to mark off verse to show its metrical structure. The eye running down a page, and the machine running across one, came afterwards.
Middle English
scanne
English, today
scan
Built from
From Middle English scanne. From late Middle English scanne (“to mark off verse to show metrical structure”), from earlier scanden, from Latin scandere (“to scan verse”), from Classical scandō (“to climb, rise, mount”), from Proto-Indo-European skend- (“to jump, dart, climb, scale, scan”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA