browse

verb

1. To scan, to casually look through in order to find items of interest, especially without knowledge of what to look for beforehand.

   “I'm just browsing around.”

   “I stopped in several bookstores to browse.”

   “At Hampton Court the little flocks of visitors are not provided with an official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion upon the local antiquities.”

   “The little room in which he found himself was plainly the bookseller's sanctum, and contained his own private library. Gilbert browsed along the shelves curiously. The volumes were mostly shabby and bruised; they had evidently been picked up one by one in the humble mangers of the second-hand vendor.”

2. To move about while sampling, such as with food or products on display.
3. (transitive)To navigate through hyperlinked documents on a computer, usually with a browser.

   “HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.”

4. (intransitive)To move about while eating parts of plants, especially plants other than pasture, such as shrubs or trees.

   “Sheep ranged everywhere under the low cedars. They browsed with noses in the frost, and from all around came the tinkle of tiny bells on the curly-horned rams, and an endless variety of bleats.”

   “Also, when planting to provide a source of browse for wintering deer and elk, protect seedlings from browsing during the first several years; an electric fence enclosure can offer effective protection.”

5. (archaic)To feed on, as pasture; to pasture on; to graze.

   “The fields between / Are dewy-fresh, brows'd by deep-udder'd kine, […]”

   ““If fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how many of them eats with their heads pointed the same direction?””

noun

1. (uncountable)Young shoots and twigs.

   “And with their horned feet the greene gras wore, / The whiles their Gotes upon the brouzes fedd […]”

   “Sheep, goats, and oxen, and the nobler steed, / On browz, and corn, and flowery meadows feed.”

2. (uncountable)Fodder for cattle and other animals.

   “The Grand Canyon seems to us Mormons to mark the line. There's enough browse here to feed a hundred thousand cattle. But water's the thing.”

   “Also, when planting to provide a source of browse for wintering deer and elk, protect seedlings from browsing during the first several years; an electric fence enclosure can offer effective protection.”

   “In the Panhandle Area, bison eat browse that includes mesquite and elm.”

3. (countable)The act of browsing through something.

   “I had a browse in the old bookshop.”

4. (countable)That which one browses through; something to read.

   “Here he buried himself in a close-printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for some time.”

5. (Cornwall, uncountable)Bruised fish used as bait.

   “He cast in his hook-and-line, intending to take one fish only for his supper, from the multitude that always came around the rock on which he stood as soon as he cast in "browse" (garbage to attract fish).”