viewer
Pluralviewers
- 1A member of a television audience.
The broadcaster designs its evening schedule around what the average viewer wants.
Loyal viewers complained when their favorite show moved to a later time slot.
- 2A person who watches a spectacle; an onlooker or spectator.
A single viewer lingered after the fireworks to watch the smoke clear.
Spectators and other viewers packed the square to see the royal procession.
Similarspectator, onlooker, observer, watcher
Note
The agent noun the other meanings grow from: Middle English vewer, simply view plus -er. It reaches well beyond fireworks and processions. Antonio Saggio writes of all viewers of a van Gogh, and a 2014 piece on unboxing videos asks what draws viewers online. It usually takes of to name what is watched, and it fits someone looking alone at a canvas or a screen as easily as a crowd.
- 3An optical device used for looking at photographic slides.
He threaded a slide into the handheld viewer and squinted at the image.
Vintage viewers let collectors examine old transparencies in fine detail.
- 4Software that opens a file and shows its contents on screen.
The image viewer rendered the file without letting her edit a single pixel.
Developers shipped a lightweight log viewer for reading server output.
Note
Software names this tool by what it holds back. A viewer opens a file for reading, usually without letting you change it, and that is what separates it from an editor. It mostly appears in compounds naming the kind of file, such as image viewer or log viewer, and the compound tells you at once that you can look but not alter.
- 5An appointed inspector or examiner.
The court named a viewer to examine the damaged property and report his findings.
Parish viewers measured the flooded fields and recorded each tenant's loss.
Note
An office rather than an onlooker: this viewer was named by a court or local authority to inspect land, works or goods and report back. The title now survives mainly in historical and legal records. In modern prose it needs framing, as in "a viewer appointed by the court," or readers will take it for the everyday watcher.
- 6The person in charge of a coal mine, responsible for directing its operations and ventilation.
Each morning the viewer descended the pit to inspect the new workings.
The colliery's viewer redesigned the ventilation after the explosion.
Similarmanager
Note
The coalfield grew its own version of the appointed inspector. Here the viewer was no visiting examiner but the man in charge of the pit, planning its underground workings and keeping air moving through them. Like the older office, the title belongs to history, so a modern account of a colliery would simply speak of its manager.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English vewer, equivalent to "view" combined with the suffix "-er".