Moving forward slowly with the front part first, or sniffing to investigate something with one's nose.
From Old English 'nosu' (nose) plus the suffix '-ing.' The verb sense of 'to nose' emerged in the 16th century meaning to move nose-first.
Dogs have 300 million olfactory receptors compared to our 6 million, so when a dog is 'nosing around,' it's reading the world like we read a book—gathering incredible amounts of information.
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