Other forms: dreamers
A dreamer is somebody whose plans run ahead of what is possible. An idle dreamer, a hopeless dreamer, he is a dreamer.
It is usually mildly critical and sometimes affectionate — dreamers are impractical rather than dishonest, and English is not sure whether that is a fault. It also means simply somebody who is dreaming. Note daydreamer, which is only critical; and that in America the Dreamers are people brought to the country as children without documents, named after a proposed act, which is a serious political use of a soft word.
1noundreamerSomebody whose plans run ahead of what is possible.
“He was a dreamer and about a third of it came off.”
dreamer is a person of impractical plans.
The word is dream plus -er. Dream itself meant joy and music in Old English and took the sleeping sense from Norse, so a dreamer is named from a word that changed meaning entirely underneath it.
Middle English
dremer
English, today
dreamer
From Middle English dremer, dremere, dremare, equivalent to dream + -er. Cognate with West Frisian dreamer (“dreamer”), stq Dröömer (“dreamer”), Dutch dromer (“dreamer”), German Träumer (“dreamer”), Danish drømmer (“dreamer”), Swedish drömmare (“dreamer”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA