Glare

How to spell glare

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce glare

What does glare mean?

1. nounA strong, dazzling light that makes it hard to see.
2. verbTo shine with a strong, dazzling light.
3. nounA long, fierce, angry stare.
4. verbTo stare at someone with a fierce, angry expression.

Glare in a sentence

• noun

  The glare off the wet road made driving difficult.

• verb

  The desert sun can glare off the white sand all day.

• noun

  The referee gave the player a stern glare after the foul.

• verb

  He would glare at anyone who jumped the queue.

• noun

  She lowered the blinds to cut the afternoon glare on her screen.

• verb

  Bare bulbs tend to glare unpleasantly in a small kitchen.

Where does glare come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Glare descends from Middle English glaren, meaning 'to shine brightly' or 'to stare fiercely', which is closely related to Middle Low German and Middle Dutch glaren, 'to gleam'. These forms belong to a wider Germanic family of words beginning with the gl- cluster that all suggest light and brightness, including 'glow', 'gleam', 'glitter' and 'glass'. The earliest English uses, recorded around the 1300s, applied both to the dazzle of intense light and to the hard, hostile look of someone's eyes, since a fierce stare was imagined as a kind of shining out. Over time the two senses settled side by side: a bright surface can glare, and an angry person can glare. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the spelling rarely troubles writers; the only mild trap is the silent final -e and the -are ending shared with 'flare' and 'stare'.

How the word is built

• glare (single Germanic root meaning to gleam or shine; no separable prefix or suffix)