Translation of "polling" into English

The process of periodically determining the status of each device in a set so that the active program can process the events generated by each device, such as whether a mouse button was pressed or whether new data is available at a serial port. This can be contrasted with event-driven processing, in which the operating system alerts a program or routine to the occurrence of an event by means of an interrupt or message rather than having to check each device in turn.

Polling (computer science) [..]

actively sampling the status of an external device by a client program as a synchronous activity