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seeker

UK/ˈsiːkə/US/ˈsikəɹ/
nounB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,617 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: seekers

A seeker is somebody looking for something. An asylum seeker, a job seeker, a seeker after truth.

It appears mostly in fixed compounds: asylum seeker and job seeker are both official categories with legal meaning. On its own it has a spiritual flavour, and a seeker after truth is somebody searching rather than somebody who has arrived.

Definitions of seeker

  1. 1nounseekerSomebody looking for something.B2

    “The mountain monastery attracts spiritual seekers from all over the world.”

seeker is a person.

Where it comes from

Old English secare comes from secan, to seek, from a Germanic root. Beseech is a relative.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *sōkārijaz

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *sōkārī

  3. Old English

    *sēċare

  4. Middle English

    sekar

  5. English, today

    seeker

From Middle English sekar, sekere (also sechar, sechere), from Old English sēċare, from Proto-West Germanic sōkārī, from Proto-Germanic sōkārijaz. Equivalent to seek + -er. Cognate with Dutch zoeker, German Sucher, German Low German Söker, Gothic 𐍃𐍉𐌺𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐍃, Norwegian søker, stq Säiker, West Frisian syker, and Yiddish זוכער.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

seeker in the wild

  • The terms asylum seeker, refugee and illegal immigrant are often confused.

    Asylum seeker

  • In North American English, the term asylee is used both for an asylum seeker, as defined above, and a person whose right of asylum has been granted.

    Asylum seeker

  • Infrared seekers are passive devices, which, unlike radar, provide no indication that they are tracking a target.

    Infrared homing

  • Heat-seekers are extremely effective: 90% of all United States air combat losses between 1984 and 2009 were caused by infrared-homing missiles.

    Infrared homing

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.