pear

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A sweet, juicy fruit that is narrow at the top and round at the bottom.

   She picked a ripe pear from the bowl and bit into it.

2. 2
   noun

   The tree that produces pears.

   An old pear tree grew at the bottom of the garden.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Pear was borrowed from Latin pirum before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England and is recorded in Old English. The related drink name perry reached English later through French from the same root.

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 substrate source. Cognate with Scots peer (“pear”), Saterland Frisian Peere, Pere (“pear”), West Frisian par (“pear”), Dutch peer (“pear”), Danish, Greenlandic, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk pære (“pear”), Faroese, Icelandic pera (“pear”), Swedish päron (“pear”), German Birne (“pear”), Luxembourgish Bier, Bir (“pear”), Vilamovian biyn (“pear”), Yiddish באַר…

Topics

External links

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• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary