WORD FACT

The Latin root “scandō”, meaning “to climb,” gives us words like ascend (climb up), descend (climb down), and transcend (surpass).

The infinitive of scandō, scandere, was applied to poetry to mean “stepping along (climbing) the metrical feet of a poem”. This is where the English words scan and scansion come from.

“Scanning poetry” is thus not derived from the general definition of scanning as “examining something closely” — on the contrary, the analytical meaning of scan developed from the poetic sense.