How breasts became browsers

While it is no surprise that some people use web browsers to keep abreast of the news, it might raise a few eyebrows to learn that breast is the most likely etymological origin of the word browser.

Browse can be traced back to the German word brust meaning breast.

Before being mangled in the mists of time, browse germinated from the word brouster, the Middle French for 'to crop and eat young shoots and leaves', stemming from the Old French word brost or broust meaning ‘buds or young shoots’. One theory is the English wrongly mistook the French word broust for past tense so dropped the 't' to make brouse. To go back even further, it has roots in the Old Saxon brustian ‘to bud or sprout’ and the Proto-Germanic breust or brust meaning ‘breast’ from the Proto-Indo-European bhreus- 'to swell'. These words have also resulted in the modern German brust meaning 'breast' and brustwarzen, which translates quite literally to ‘breast warts’, a descriptive if rather inelegant word for nipples. 

The earliest form of browse cropped up in the 15th century as bruse and brouse, referring to both the shoots and leaves eaten by animals, and also the act of eating the vegetation, hence the term browsing. So technically the first browsers were feeding animals like cows and goats but by the mid-16th century, a browser was also a person who cut the foliage for the animals to eat during the winter.

A browsing grey rhebok, a small antelope native to South Africa and Zimbabwe.

A few centuries later, people casually looking through books were compared to cattle lazily grazing, so this activity also became known as browsing and the people doing the browsing became known as browsers. One of the earliest references to browsing in this context appeared in the London Magazine in 1820:

"He brouzes on the husk and leaves of books, as the young fawn browzes on the bark and leaves of trees."

Another hundred years later the word browser made its way into computing with the introduction of an automatic indexing online retrieval system developed by IBM in 1971. This system provided the IBM 2260 with a natural query language and online browsing capabilities. The invention was effectively the grandfather of the modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer that are used by billions of people worldwide today.

The IBM 2260 computer that the first BROWSER was tested on.

Computer scientist John Williams called it the BROWSER, clearly inspired by the verb, but somewhat clumsily claiming it was an acronym for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval. Unfortunately when it comes to naming things, some programmers can be prone to making boobs.