Other forms: staring, stares, stared
To stare is to hold your eyes on someone or something for far longer than is polite. A child stares at the man with the tattooed face; you stare hard at your phone in a lift so that you do not have to look at anybody.
You stare AT something — the preposition is nearly always there. Stare INTO is emptier and vaguer: stare into the fire, stare into space. The noun is the same word: a blank stare, a hard stare, he gave me a long stare and said nothing. Stare somebody down means to win a contest of eyes. Keep the neighbours apart: gaze is longer and fonder and often at scenery, glare is angry, glance is quick, and peer is what you do when you cannot quite see.
1verbstareTo hold your eyes on someone or something for a long time, in a way that reads as rude.
“People stared at her boots the whole way down the carriage.”
2verbfixedlyTo look fixedly into the distance while thinking of nothing much.
“He sat and stared out of the window until it got dark.”
3nounfixedA long fixed look.
“She met the question with a flat stare.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
The oldest meaning here is stiffness, not sight. Proto-Germanic starāną meant "to be fixed, be rigid", and German still has starr for "stiff" standing right beside starren, "to stare". Old English starian narrowed the idea down to the eyes, so a stare is a face gone rigid. Dutch staren does the same job with the same word.
Proto-Indo-European
*ster-
Proto-Germanic
*starjaną
Proto-West Germanic
*starēn
Old English
starian — to stare
Middle English
staren
English, today
stare
Built from
From Middle English staren, from Old English starian (“to stare”), from Proto-West Germanic starēn, from Proto-Germanic starjaną, starāną (“to be fixed, be rigid”), from Proto-Indo-European ster-. Cognate with Dutch staren (“to stare”), German starren (“to stare”), German starr (“stiff”). More at start.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA