Passer

How to spell passer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce passer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does passer mean?

1. nounA person who passes by or goes past a place, or one who passes something such as a ball or a test.

Passer in a sentence

• In football, a good passer can pick out a teammate from forty yards away.

• The quarterback was the most accurate passer the team had fielded in years.

Where does passer come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is simply the verb 'pass' fitted with the agent suffix '-er', which marks the person or thing that performs an action. 'Pass' itself reaches English through Old French 'passer', meaning 'to step, cross, or go by', which grew out of the Latin noun 'passus', literally 'a step' or 'a pace' (the same root that gives us 'pace' and 'passage'). By the time the verb settled into English in the 1200s and 1300s it covered moving past, handing over, and going through, and the '-er' form names whoever does any of that. The spelling trap is small but real: the single root keeps its double 's' from the French, and the agent ending is plain '-er' rather than '-or', so the assembled word is 'passer'. It appears most often inside the compound 'passer-by', the person who happens to be walking past.

How the word is built

• pass (from Latin passare: to step, to go by)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)