looker-on
Americannoun
-
lookers-on
plural
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of looker-on
1530–40; look on + -er 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“I am by nature a looker-on rather than a taker-part.”
From New York Times ● Oct. 12, 2017
When he arrived in Paris, in the seventeen-forties, at the age of thirty, he was a deracinated looker-on, struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion, and rejection provoked by a self-absorbed élite.
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 25, 2016
"Are you her," asks a looker-on, "or are you the drill?"
From The Guardian ● Aug. 13, 2011
"Christ, oh Christ . . . the King's horse!" cried a looker-on.
From Time Magazine Archive
But the attentive looker-on knows that the solitary monkey's life behind the bars is in its way nothing but a tragedy, as well as Cervantes' immortal book is nothing but a mournful epic.
From Vagaries by Axel Munthe
A large crowd of amateur photographers, space enthusiasts and assorted lookers-on watched the lift-off from an adjoining beach.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 31, 2022
This is the way a meme ends: its nihilism co-opted into earnestness by embarrassingly sincere lookers-on not online enough to know better, and trying too hard.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 9, 2022
His swearing in was turned to spectacle, complete with throngs of adoring lookers-on, invocations of the divine, and a gun salute.
From Time ● Jan. 13, 2017
Despite all the prestige, money, and adoring lookers-on, at a certain point altruism no longer represents any kind of long-term strategy.
From Slate ● Oct. 20, 2014
The lookers-on become impatient of their customary duty of showing sympathy, because they find it too much trouble to maintain the appearance of this emotion for any length of time.
From Human, All-Too-Human, Part II by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
