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Allin

appear

verbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əˈpɪə//
  • United States//əˈpɪɹ//
  • United States/[əˈpʰɪɹ]/
  • Scotland//əˈpiːɹ//

To come or be in sight; to be in view; to become visible.

verb

  1. 1

    To come or be in sight; to be in view; to become visible.

    And God[…]said, Let[…]the dry land appear.

    There were also particles no one had predicted that just appeared. Five of them […, i]n order of increasing modernity, […] are the neutrino, the pi meson, the antiproton, the quark and the Higgs boson.

  2. 2

    To come before the public.

    A great writer appeared at that time.

    Miss Phyllis Morgan, as the hapless heroine dressed in the shabbiest of clothes, appears in the midst of a gay and giddy throng; she apostrophises all and sundry there, including the villain, and has a magnificent scene which always brings down the house, and nightly adds to her histrionic laurels.

  3. 3

    To stand in presence of some authority, tribunal, or superior person, to answer a charge, plead a cause, etc.; to present oneself as a party or advocate before a court, or as a person to be tried.

    We must all appear before the judgment seat.

    One ruffian escaped because no prosecutor dared to appear.

  4. 4

    To become visible to the apprehension of the mind; to be known as a subject of observation or comprehension, or as a thing proved; to be obvious or manifest.

    It doth not yet appear what we shall be.

    Of their vain contest appeared no end.

    ‘Then the father has a great fight with his terrible conscience,’ said Munday with granite seriousness. ‘Should he make a row with the police[…]? Or should he say nothing about it and condone brutality for fear of appearing in the newspapers?

    Surprisingly, this analysis revealed that acute exposure to solvent vapors at concentrations below those associated with long-term effects appears to increase the risk of a fatal automobile accident. Furthermore, this increase in risk is comparable to the risk of death from leukemia after long-term exposure to benzene,[…].

  5. 5

    To seem; to have a certain semblance; to look.

    He appeared quite happy with the result.

    They disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast.

    Mr. Campion appeared suitably impressed and she warmed to him. He was very easy to talk to with those long clown lines in his pale face, a natural goon, born rather too early she suspected.

  6. 6

    To bring into view

    [Angelo] is yet a devil / His filth within being cast, he would appear / A pond as deep as hell.

Etymology

From Middle English apperen, aperen, borrowed from Old French aparoir (French apparoir), from Latin appāreō (“to appear”), from ad (“to”) + pāreō (“to come forth, to become visible”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂-s- (“watch, see”), s-present of *peh₂- (“protect”).

Forms

past tense
appeared
past participle
appeared
present participle
appearing
third person singular
appears
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).