Other forms: pears
A pear is the green fruit shaped like a soft bell, cousin of the apple. A ripe pear, poached pears, a pear tree.
It ripens from the inside out and never properly on the tree, which is why it should be picked hard and left in a bowl — by the time the outside gives, the middle is often past it. Plant pears for your heirs is the old saying about how slowly the trees bear.
1nounpearA soft bell-shaped fruit related to the apple.
“She peeled a ripe pear and cut it into slices.”
pear is a fruit.
Old English pere comes from Latin pirum, the name of the fruit.
Middle English
pere
English, today
pear
From Middle English pere. From Middle English pere, from Old English pere, from Proto-West Germanic peru, from Vulgar Latin pira, originally the plural of Latin pirum but reconstrued as a feminine singular, ultimately a loanword from an unknown Mediterranean qfa-sub - source. Cognate with Scots peer (“pear”), stq Peere, Pere (“pear”), West Frisian par (“pear”), Dutch peer (“pear”), Danish -, kl -, Norwegian Bokmål -, Norwegian Nynorsk pære (“pear”), Faroese -, Icelandic pera (“pear”), Swedish päron (“pear”), German Birne (“pear”), lb Bier, Bir (“pear”), wym biyn (“pear”), Yiddish באַר (“pear”), French poire (“pear”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA