gazer
nounEtymology From gaze + -er.
1
One who gazes.
- I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; / I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;c. 1591–1592 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ii]:
- Like lightening flash, that hath the gazer burned, / So did the sight thereof their sense dismay, / That backe againe upon themselves they turned, / And with their ryder ranne perforce away:1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 38:
4 more examples
- Knots of gazers and gossips were collected in the churchyard, at the bridge, and at the spot where the hat and pumpkin had been found.1820, Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:
- I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in.1854, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, published 1910, pages 86–7:
- A few years before I had been one of the gazers at the Zoolus, and the Aztecs in London. Now the tables were turned upon me, for I was to these people a new and strange variety of man, and had the honour of affording to them, in my own person, an attractive exhibition, gratis.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 241:
- Keen lemon-yellow hurts the eye in time as a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note the ear, and the gazer turns away to seek relief in blue or green.1914, Wassily Kandinsky, chapter V, in M.T.H. Sadler, Houghton Mifflin, transl., The Art of Spiritual Harmony, page 49:
- Derived terms
- crystal-gazer, moongazer, shadow gazer, shoegazer, skygazer, stargazer, sungazer