Around ten at night, as I sidle stealthily toward the fridge, my wife will often call out, “Mark, no grazing!” She means, of course, that I shouldn’t snack between meals, a North American habit that came to be known as grazing in the late 1970s. The word is apt because it implies the oblivious munching that we associate with barnyard animals, a hunger that is prompted not so much by the lack of food as by its convenient presence. The word graze is closely related to grass, since grass is usually what animals graze upon. This connection also explains the use of graze to denote a stroke that barely makes contact, as in “grazed by a bullet”: after grass has been grazed, the stubble is short and close to the ground. More distant relatives of graze include the words green and grow, all of which evolved from an Indo-European source that meant to grow. Interestingly, the word browse originally meant something very similar to graze: in the sixteenth century, browse meant to feed on tree leaves, as do deer and goats. By the nineteenth century, though, browse had developed a figurative meaning denoting the act of flipping through a book; this sense then generalized to include the act of perusing merchandise in a store.
A scrape on the skin surface, making some blood flow.