Peter

How to spell peter

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce peter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does peter mean?

1. verbTo dwindle and gradually come to an end, almost always in the phrase 'peter out'.

Peter in a sentence

• The funding began to peter out before the project was finished.

• Their initial enthusiasm seemed to peter out after a few weeks.

Where does peter come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This little verb is a genuine puzzle for word historians, and its uncertainty is part of its charm. It surfaced in the United States around the 1840s in the slang of gold and silver miners, who used 'peter out' to describe a vein of ore that gradually thinned and gave nothing more. Beyond that mining context the trail goes cold, and no one has proved where the 'peter' element came from. One popular suggestion links it to the French péter, meaning 'to break wind' or 'to explode and then fizzle', while another points to saltpetre (potassium nitrate), the key ingredient of the gunpowder miners used for blasting, whose effect quickly spent itself. Both ideas are plausible but unproven, so the safest verdict is that the origin is genuinely unknown. The lowercase verb is unrelated to the personal name Peter, which comes instead from the Greek petros meaning 'rock'.

How the word is built

• peter (origin obscure; always paired with the particle 'out' to mean dwindle)