Other forms: glaring, glares, glared
To glare is to stare straight at someone with your anger showing. A driver glares at you through the windscreen; a teacher glares over her glasses until the back row goes quiet.
Glare is a noun as well: she gave him a glare that finished the sentence for him. It also does a second job with nothing to do with faces — glare is light that is too bright and pointed the wrong way, the white blaze off a wet road, the sun sitting on your screen at four in the afternoon. You glare at someone; the at is not optional, and you cannot glare someone. Screens and lenses are sold as anti-glare, and sunglasses are for cutting the glare off water.
1verbglareTo stare at someone with open anger.~2%
“She glared at him across the table and said nothing.”
2nounlongA long, angry stare.~2%
“One glare from the driver moved the boys off the road.”
3noundazzleHarsh light that is too bright to look at comfortably.~94%
“The glare off the snow made him screw up his eyes.”
synonyms: dazzle, brightness
4verbshineOf light: to shine so hard it hurts.~2%
“The sun glared off the white wall all afternoon.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: glower
Every relative on record is about light, not anger: Low German glaren is to shine brightly, to glow, to burn, and Middle Dutch glariën is to glisten and sparkle. English glare goes back through Middle English glaren to a Proto-West Germanic root, and glass and glower are in the same family.
Proto-West Germanic
*glāʀōn
Old English
*glærian
Middle English
glaren
English, today
glare
From Middle English glaren, from Old English glærian, from Proto-West Germanic glāʀōn. Cognate with dialectal Middle Dutch glariën (“to glisten; sparkle”), Low German glaren (“to shine brightly; glow; burn”), Middle High German glaren (“to shine brightly”). Related to glower, glass.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA