Other forms: peers, peering
To peer is to look hard at something you cannot quite make out — head forward, eyes narrowed, the rest of you held still. You peer at the small print, peer through a rained-on window, peer into a cupboard with no light in it.
Peer nearly always takes a preposition: peer at, peer into, peer through, peer over, peer down. The effort is the whole point — if you can see the thing without trying, you are looking, not peering. A second peer, a noun, arrived by a different road and means an equal. Your peers are the people of your own age or standing, which gives peer group, peer pressure, and peer review, where other researchers check your work before it is published. In Britain a peer is also a member of the House of Lords. The two words are unrelated and only ended up spelled alike.
1verbpeerTo look hard and closely at something that is difficult to see.~10%
“He peered at the label without his glasses.”
2nounequalSomeone of the same age, rank or standing as you.~78%
“Teenagers care most about what their peers think.”
synonyms: equal
3nounbritainIn Britain, a member of the House of Lords.~12%
“The bill was sent back by peers in the Lords.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 186 sentences found in the wild and placed 179 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
PEER → a PIER
You are standing on a wooden pier in thick fog. Something dark is moving on the water below, a boat or a bird, and you cannot tell which. You lean right out over the end of the pier with both hands round your eyes.
hooks ontopier
Two words ended up wearing the same four letters. The verb comes from Middle English piren, to peer or gaze, and it is a relative of pore, as in poring over a book. The noun comes from Latin pār, equal, through Old French per — which makes it a doublet of pair and par. Your peers are your pars: the ones level with you.
Old English
*pȳran
Middle English
peren
English, today
peer
Built from
From Middle English peren, from Old English pȳran. From Middle English peren, pyren, piren (“to peer, gaze”), perhaps from Old English pȳran (“to look, peer”), from Proto-West Germanic pūrijan (“to look”), related to stq pierje (“to look”), nds-nl piren (“to look”), vls pieren (“to look with narrowed eyes, squint at”), Dutch pieren (“to look closely at, examine”), Middle English pouren (“to gaze, look closely”), English pore (“to study meticulously”). Compare also West Frisian pluere (“to peer”), Dutch pluren (“to gaze squintingly”), German Low German plieren (“to blink”), Danish plire (“to peer”), Swedish plira, blira (“to peer”), and thence ultimately related to the root of English blear. The sense meaning "to be visible" is perhaps from a shortening of appear.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA