Sensory Overload: Now See Here: Words For Looking

A beam can refer to the focused light emitted by something like a flashlight or laser, but it also means "to smile broadly". Think about someone's face lighting up from happiness: that's beaming.

To gape means to stare, but with your mouth open in amazement or shock, like when an alien spaceship rises up out of the ocean and then Godzilla grabs it out of the sky and eats it like a giant metal chalupa. Agape is a related word meaning "wide open", again referring to your mouth as you witness a scene that's awesome and terrifying at the same time.

Gawk is a pretty close synonym of gape, but with the implication that the viewer isn't that bright, and might be part of a group all looking at the same impressive sight.

A glance is just a flick of the eyes, like you'd use to check your mirror before changing lanes in a car. A glancing blow, say, in a sword fight, is one that bounces off without doing much damage.

Where a gaze is a long look without much connotation, a glare is an angry look, as if your emotion should cause the person you're glaring at to need sunglasses.

Glower comes from Scottish, and it means to frown or scowl angrily, as if a dark cloud has passed over your face. This makes sense, because it also can be used to describe gloomy weather.

If you open your eyes wide in surprise, so wide that they look like goggles, congratulations! You just goggled at something.

From Dutch or German, to ogle something or someone is to look longingly at it or them. It's not a flattering word for the person doing the ogling; while it might be okay to ogle the cakes at a bakery, it's not cool to ogle a person you find attractive.

Scruta in Latin means "trash", "scraps", or "old broken stuff". A scrutator was an inspector, in the sense that they looked at everything, even garbage. So if you scrutinize something, subjecting it to scrutiny, you're carefully examining it in minute detail.

When you walk out of a movie into a sunny parking lot, you need to squint for a minute while your eyes adjust to the bright light.

A surveyor is a person who uses precise measurements to lay out a large-scale construction project like a highway. If you survey a scene, you're taking it all in, observing carefully, and noting all the details.