peering

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of peer.

   He stood peering at the faded inscription carved into the old stone.

   Peering over the garden fence, she finally spotted the missing dog.

   Note

   One spelling serves every verb use of peer. It can mean looking hard, as in peering at an inscription, or the obsolete coming into sight. It can also mean making equal in rank, or networks exchanging traffic. Context alone tells them apart. As a gerund it shades into the noun for a searching look, which, unlike the participle, can take a plural: peerings.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of one who looks closely or searchingly; a careful looking around.

   A long peering into the morning fog finally revealed the distant shoreline.

   The guard's constant peering at passing strangers made the travelers uneasy.

   Similarscrutiny, staring, squinting

3. 3
   noununcountable

   An arrangement in which two networks carry each other's traffic on equal terms, usually without charging one another.

   The two internet providers established peering at a regional exchange point.

   A settlement-free peering arrangement kept both companies' bandwidth costs down.

   Oppositetransit

   Note

   Network economics sets it against transit, where one provider pays another to carry its traffic. Peering is the trade between equals that avoids the bill. In this sense the noun is freely countable. Peter Willis's Carrier-Scale IP Networks (2001) describes a provider using "private peerings and bilateral peerings" at exchange points in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Private, bilateral and settlement-free are its typical qualifiers.

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