scan

Pronunciation: /skæn/

The English word “scan” has 14 meanings listed here.

verb

To examine sequentially, carefully, or critically; to scrutinize; to behold closely.
To inspect, analyse or go over, often to find something.
To look about for; to look over quickly.
To perform lexical analysis; to tokenize.
To create an image of something with the use of a scanner.
To read with an electronic device.
To mount by steps; to go through with step by step.
To read or mark so as to show a specific metre.
To conform to a metrical structure.

noun

Of written things, a careful reading.
Of written things, a cursory reading: a skim.
An instance of scanning.
The result or output of a scanning process.
A higher-order function that applies a binary operation to a sequence of values, starting with an accumulator, and returns a new sequence with the results.

Etymology

From late Middle English scanne (“to mark off verse to show metrical structure”), from earlier scanden, from Late Latin scandere (“to scan verse”), from Classical Latin scandō (“to climb, rise, mount”), from Proto-Indo-European *skend- (“to jump, dart, climb, scale, scan”).

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.