traverseren

Traverseren is a Dutch verb meaning to traverse, cross, or pass through. It is used in physical, mathematical, and technical contexts to describe moving across something or visiting elements in a sequence. The word is a loanword from French traverser, which itself derives from Latin trans- “across” and vertere “to turn” or “to go.” In everyday use, it can refer to crossing a landscape, moving through a building, or surveying a route.

In geography and surveying, traverseren describes moving across terrain or along a planned trajectory, such as traversing a landscape for exploration, measurement, or navigation. In road planning and logistics, it can mean covering a set of locations in a sequence or route.

In computer science and data analysis, traverseren denotes visiting elements of a data structure in some order. Common traversal methods include depth-first traversal (DFS) and breadth-first traversal (BFS) of graphs and trees, and in trees you may encounter in-order, pre-order, and post-order traversals. A traversal typically aims to visit each element at least once, sometimes with a particular ordering, and may collect information, search for a value, or perform computations along the way.

The term is used broadly across disciplines, with precise meaning adapted to context, from physically crossing space to systematically visiting items in a dataset.