Word.ws English Dictionary

peeler

UK/ˈpiːlə/US/ˈpiːlɚ/

peeler noun: a police officer.

peeler: a police officer
Image: Fritz von Uhde, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

peeler (plural peelers)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, slang) A police officer.
    • A peeler man who heard the din came in to see the show;
      He tried to run the bushman in, but he refused to go.
      And when at last the barber spoke, and said "'Twas all in fun—
      'Twas just a little harmless joke, a trifle overdone."1892, Banjo Paterson, The Man from Ironbark
    • I’d covered pretty nearly two miles before I came across a peeler, — and when I did the man was cracked — and he thought me mad, or drunk, or both. By the time I’d got myself within nodding distance of being run in for obstructing the police in the execution of their duty, […] Holt was out of sight.1897, Richard Marsh, The Beetle
    Synonyms:
    police officer

Noun (2)

peeler (plural peelers)

  1. One who peels.
    • According to another superstition, the longer the peel, the longer the peeler's life would be.2014, Karen Jean Matsko Hood, Halloween Delights Cookbook: A Collection of Halloween Recipes, →ISBN
    1. A person whose job it is to peel fruit or vegetable produce.
      • She and I took a few minutes together once the belts began rolling with red tomatoes and with the shiny cans which clanked their hollow wind-chime twang as they paraded down the chute on the way to their own conveyor belts which ran parallel to the wide ones the tomatoes rode on. In order to get...2001, Marisa De Franceschi, Family Matters, →ISBN, page 26
    2. A person who works by peeling the bark off trees.
      • From about this time, it became customary to permit the peelers to appear annually before the government, immediately after the termination of the cinnamon-harvest.1833, Asiatic Journal, page 272
      • Women cooked and cleaned in the larger camps, where the peelers stayed for a month or more. A good peeler could make two cords of bark a day, felling hemlocks and peeling the bark off only the trunk below the first branch.2009, David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills, →ISBN, page 31
    3. (derogatory, slang) A stripper; one who disrobes for entertainment.
    4. (obsolete) One who peels or pillages.
  2. A household utensil for peeling fruit or vegetables.
    • I like to use a swivel peeler on my apples, mainly because a good peeler removes the skin only, without hacking off the flesh underneath the way a knife will, even in deft hands.2011, Ken Haedrich, Apple Pie, →ISBN
    • The OXO peeler was a game-changer. More than 10 million have been sold to date, and it threw open the entire market in peelers, causing numerous rivals to be invented: serrated fruit peelers, vegetable peelers with curved blades, Y-shaped and C-shaped and U-shaped peelers in any colour you desire...2012, Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, →ISBN
  3. An industrial food-processing machine for removing the peels or skins.
    • Fish-processing equipment consists of 33, 181, 189, 188, 694 Baader machines and others which would be replaced for six months by krill peelers with associated devices.1985, E. Budziński, P. Bykowski, D. Dutkiewicz, Possibilities of Processing and Marketing of Products Made from Antarctic Krill, →ISBN
    • Peelers with knife blades mounted in the outside walls of a revolving drum in which the product is tumbled have a similar effect as an abrasion peeler.1991, David Arthey, Colin Dennis, Vegetable Processing, →ISBN, page 52
  4. Something to be peeled.
    • To prepare the vignette, the limits of all control areas are scribed as thin lines on one sheet of coated plastic, and a mask is prepared for each of the two colors on plastic sheets with a peeler coating.1965, Progress Report on the Cartographic Activities of the United States
    • Canning apples ("peelers") must be over 2-1/2 inches in diameter; peelers may have surface damage since they will be peeled in the process of making apple sauce or slices, but they must be round for the peeling machines to handle them properly.1986, United States International Trade Commission, Apple juice: report to the President on investigation no. TA-201-59 under section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, page A-1
  5. Something that is peeling, about to peel, or prone to peeling.
    • Xanthan gum was introduced into a traditional, wax-based coating formulation for easy peelers.2008, Amos Nussinovitch, Water-Soluble Polymer Applications in Foods, →ISBN, page 52
    • It will be necessary to continually monitor the holes for voids and the plating for peelers -- but this is a good idea for any plating operation which uses dry film photoresist.2012, Raymond H. Clark, Handbook of Printed Circuit Manufacturing, →ISBN, page 171
    1. An edible crab that is about to shed its shell.
      • They bought peelers [crabs that would soon shed] and kept them in large wooden floats until the crabs shed.1986, Ruth Scarborough Tate, Suzanne Tate, Duck Tales: Folk Tales and Anecdotes, →ISBN
      • Once the crab has molted, the new shell takes about four days to harden. Just after shedding, the blue crab's shell is soft enough to eat. Watermen harvest soft shell crabs as peelers (about to shed), rank peelers (within hours of shedding) and busters (in the process of shedding).2007, Aliza Green, Field Guide to Seafood, →ISBN
  6. An ideal wave.
    • Fancy a wave, one of those little peelers?2010, Sam Bleakley, Surfing Brilliant Corners, →ISBN, page 174
    • If he could ride a trend as well as he could ride a First Point Malibu peeler—well, that's how the game was played.2011, Matt Warshaw, The History of Surfing, →ISBN, page 465
  7. A plant which impoverishes the soil by demanding high value nutrients and so requires the use of fertilizers.
  8. Someone who breaks horses.
    • It took a real good bronc peeler ( horse breaker ) to handle those big 79 broncs ;1969, Ralph F. Jones, Longhorns North of the Arkansas, page 84
    • My old daddy always said that the purpose of breakin a horse was to ride it and if you got one to break you just as well to saddle up and climb aboard and get on with it. John Grady grinned. Was your old daddy a certified peeler?1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, →ISBN, page 106

Noun (3) capitalized: Peeler

Peeler (plural Peelers)

  1. (Ireland, alternative, slang) Alternative form of peeler (policeman).
    • The rest, on the contrary, the rather congratulated themselves on having parted with such suspicious company; -- and the little tailor had scarcely time to enunciate his advice, "to be chatting and walking on, as if they weren't thinking of or minding them at all," — when the sergeant of the party...1839, Dennis Burrowes Kelly, The manor of Glenmore; or, The Irish peasant, by a member of the Irish bar
    • It at once became abundantly manifest, that those six Peelers had arrived with some object in view; and before the Sovereign People had time even to guess what that object might be, one of the Peelers very coolly depreived the horse of his nose-bag; another just as coolly returned the bit to his...1840, Henry Cockton, The life and adventures of Valentine Vox, the ventriloquist, page 159

Proper noun capitalized: Peeler

Peeler (plural Peelers)

  1. A surname.

peeler meaning in Gujarati, Arabic and Persian

peeler in Gujarati

person who peels food
છોલનાર cholnār
kitchen utensil
છોલણી cholṇī

peeler in Arabic

kitchen utensil
مِقْشَرَة miqšara

peeler in Persian

kitchen utensil
پوستکن pust-kan

Examples of peeler in a sentence

  • I was standin' there and the car came down the street with the two peelers comin' after them and I'm standin' here with [my son] in my arms.2004, Alice McIntyre, Women in Belfast: How Violence Shapes Identity, →ISBN, page 57:
  • How do you fight back to get your right back to walk free down the street when your name and address singles you out for every Peeler on the beat?2004, “Don’t Hand Me Over”, in The Box Set 1964-2004(2004) No.2, performed by Christy Moore:
  • It was Jem and Georgie that was in mortal danger, true, but there was not one of us that wanted the peelers asking us questions.2013, James Benmore, Dodger, →ISBN:
  • Females trained in household arts received good pay, while males sought jobs on large farms, as bark peelers at lumber mills or axmen for logging companies, and as track hands for the railroads.2009, Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance During the Early Reservation Years, 1850-1900, →ISBN:

All 22 example sentences with peeler

Synonyms of peeler

Forms of peeler

Noun
pluralpeelers
alternative formPeeler
pluralPeelers
Proper noun
pluralPeelers

Origin of peeler

From the surname of Sir Robert Peel, who established the Irish constabulary and London's police force; compare bobby, from the given name.

From Middle English peler, piller, pyllare, pilour, pelure, pelour, equivalent to peel + -er.

Words formed from peeler

Phrases with peeler

Words that rhyme with peeler

Questions about peeler

What does peeler mean?
Peeler means a police officer.
What is peeler in Gujarati?
Peeler in Gujarati is છોલનાર (cholnār), છોલણી (cholṇī). See Peeler meaning in Gujarati.
How do you use peeler in a sentence?
I was standin' there and the car came down the street with the two peelers comin' after them and I'm standin' here with [my son] in my arms.
What part of speech is peeler?
Peeler can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce peeler?
Peeler is pronounced /ˈpiːlɚ/ (US).
What is the plural of peeler?
The plural of peeler is peelers.

Words near peeler in the dictionary

  1. peeled back the onion
  2. peeled off
  3. peeled out
  4. peeled rubber
  5. peeled the onion
  6. peeler
  7. peeler bar
  8. peeler bars
  9. peelers
  10. peeles
  11. peelest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: peeler (page history and authors); Peeler (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-peeler.ogg.

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