English Reference
Noun

scraping

n. uncountable
C1 Advanced US /ˈskɹeɪpɪŋ/ UK /skɹˈeɪpɪŋ/ scrap·ing UK spelling scrapings Computing

n.the process of using a computer program to copy data from a website. It is a fast way to collect a lot of information at once.

n.the automated extraction of data from websites or digital documents. Often involves parsing HTML to transform unstructured web content into a structured database format.


SIMPLE

Web scraping helps us track price changes on different sites.

CONTEXTUAL

The marketing team used web scraping to gather customer reviews from several different retail platforms for their analysis.

COMPLEX

While scraping provides valuable datasets for research, developers must ensure their scripts do not violate the website's terms of service or overwhelm the host server with excessive requests.

Usage

Often used as a gerund or as part of the compound noun 'web scraping'.

It also claims that Anthropic acquired copies of songs in other ways including scraping lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and datasets on archive sites such as Common Crawl.

The Guardian· 31 Aug 2026

Tasks like keeping medical records up to date and making sure jobs like scraping out sheds are done can take a lot of time.

BBC News· 20 Aug 2026

Etymology 1

From Middle English scrapinge, equivalent to scrape + -ing.

Etymology 2

From scrape + -ing.

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This entry
Origin Middle English scrapinge
Level C1 · Advanced
Frequency Frequent
Updated