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The Grainy History of Glean
While it is certainly true that one must reap what one sows (that is, harvest the crops that one plants), what should be done about the grain and other produce left over that the reapers missed? Well, friends, that must be gleaned—waste not, want not, after all. It’s a finicky business, too, picking through stalks and under leaves and whatnot. When it was first used in English in the 14th century, glean carried both the sense of “to gather grain or other produce left by reapers” and the more figurative meaning of “to gather information or material bit by bit,” reflecting the slow, gradual, painstaking work of scouring the fields. Over the years, and especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, glean has also come to be used frequently with the meaning “to find out, learn, ascertain.” This sense has been criticized by folks who think glean should always imply the drudgery involved in the literal grain-gathering sense, but it is well established and perfectly valid.
Examples of glean in a Sentence
Chad Jones, The Mercury News, 6 Feb. 2025
Similarly, Evo was trained (opens a new tab) on large volumes of DNA — 300 billion base pairs from 2.7 million bacterial, archaeal and viral genomes — to glean functional information from stretches of DNA that a user inputs as prompts.
—Ingrid Wickelgren, Quanta Magazine, 5 Feb. 2025
The Bulls are highly motivated to complete a series of trades this week, which means being malleable with contracts to glean as much draft capital and salary-cap flexibility as possible.
—Julia Poe, Chicago Tribune, 3 Feb. 2025
A lot can be gleaned from the position a dog chooses to sleep in too.
—Jonathan Granoff, Newsweek, 29 Jan. 2025
See all Example Sentences for glean 
Dictionary Entries Near glean
Cite this Entry
“Glean.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glean. Accessed 16 Feb. 2025.
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glean
verb
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