Grammar Source

Bring your curiosity and questions about English and let's find answers

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A site to help make English grammar more understandable without dumbing down either its significance or its usage.

I was dashing off an e-mail just now, and I used the word gleam in the sense of examining some documents and deriving meaning.

Something struck me as odd about the word.  It turns out that I really meant glean. It’s a good thing I turned instantly to my cyber-buddy Dictionary.com to verify my spelling and usage, and sure enough: Gleam: a flash or beam of light. Glean: to gather slowly and laboriously, bit by bit. Of course, these are only the first definitions for each, but as you can see, I had chosen the wrong word entirely. 

Lesson here, even for an old writer hack like me: When in doubt, look it up.

2 Responses to “Word Confusion: Gleam and Glean”

  1. Amazing, exactly same thing happened for me this week. I sent out an email with the starting sentence “Based on what I could gleam from the email thread below…”.
    Afterwards I kept thinking something was not right about my use of the word. And guess where I checked today? Yes, dictionary.com !

    That’s eerie, same thing happening for two people!
    Are you me?? :)

    Jay

  2. Totally happened to me today as well. Thanks for the clarification post.

    Brian

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