Viewer

How to spell viewer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce viewer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does viewer mean?

1. nounA person who watches something, especially television or another visual display.
2. nounA device or piece of software used to look at images, slides, or files.

Viewer in a sentence

• The documentary drew the largest viewer numbers of the year.

• She loaded the photographs into the image viewer on her laptop.

• Each viewer received a survey about the broadcast.

• The old slide viewer still sat in a box in the attic.

Where does viewer come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is built on 'view', which came into English in the late 1300s from the Anglo-Norman and Old French 'veue', meaning 'a sight' or 'an act of looking'. That noun traces back to the Latin verb 'videre', meaning 'to see', the same root that gives us 'vision', 'evident', and 'video'. The familiar agent suffix '-er', a native English ending meaning 'one who does a thing', was attached to mark the person who looks. The result, 'viewer', settled into its plain sense of a person who watches, and it became especially common in the twentieth century with the rise of television, where audiences are routinely counted as viewers. The spelling keeps the slightly awkward 'iew' cluster of 'view', which is the only real trap in an otherwise straightforward word.

How the word is built

• view (from Old French veue: sight, look)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)