Word.ws English Dictionary

by-stander

by-stander is the obsolete form of bystander.

Meaning of bystander

Noun

bystander (plural bystanders)

  1. A person who, although present at some event, does not take part in it; an observer, witness, or spectator.
    • If he wins, he will be at liberty, perhaps, to give vent to a laugh, or to pass a remark on the circumstance to a bystander, or to stake again, or to double his stake; but, even this he must do solely out of curiosity, and for the pleasure of watching the play of chances and of calculations, and...1867, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, chapter II, in The Gambler, translated by C. J. Hogarth^(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gambler_(1867)/II)
    Synonyms:
    onlooker

Forms of by-stander

pluralby-standers

Questions about by-stander

What is by-stander the obsolete form of?
By-stander is the obsolete form of bystander.

Words near by-stander in the dictionary

  1. by-room
  2. by-rooms
  3. by-running
  4. by-speech
  5. by-speeches
  6. by-stander
  7. by-standers
  8. by-street
  9. by-streets
  10. by-stroke
  11. by-strokes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by-stander (page history and authors); bystander (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “by-stander.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by-stander. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.