OCR is short for optical character recognition. It is computer software that looks at a picture of a page — a photo or a scan of paper — and tries to turn the shapes of printed letters and numbers into real text the computer can search, copy, and edit. Without OCR, a scan is just a picture of writing; with OCR, the machine “reads” the page. It works best on clear, printed type. Handwriting, stamps, and messy photocopies still give it trouble, though it has got better. People also stretch it into a loose verb: Can you OCR this form? The letters are usually said one by one, O-C-R, not as a word. Though actually, some older uses call the machine itself an optical character reader; in everyday talk now, OCR almost always means the recognising software, or the step of turning a picture into text.