Peel

How to spell peel

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce peel

What does peel mean?

1. verbTo remove the skin, rind, or outer covering from something.
2. nounThe outer skin or rind of a fruit or vegetable.

Peel in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to peel the potatoes before boiling them.

• noun

  The recipe calls for grated lemon peel for extra flavour.

• verb

  The heat caused the paint to peel away from the wall.

• noun

  She dropped the banana peel straight into the compost bin.

Where does peel come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Peel traces back to the Latin verb pilare, meaning 'to strip of hair', which was built on pilus, the Latin word for 'a hair'. That sense of stripping or removing an outer covering passed into Old French as peler, and English took it up in the medieval period as the verb 'to peel', meaning to remove the rind or skin from fruit and vegetables. Over time the noun sense developed for the skin or rind that gets removed. It is easily confused in writing with its homophone 'peal', a word for the loud ringing of bells, which comes from an entirely different source (a shortening of 'appeal'). The double 'e' in peel is the key spelling cue: think of the long, peeled strip of an apple skin stretching out.

How the word is built

• peel (verb/noun, from Latin pilare: to strip of hair)