see-er

see-er (plural see-ers)

1. Uncommon spelling of seer.
   • 1735, [Walter Harte], An Essay on Reason, 2nd edition, London: […] J[ohn] Wright for Lawton Gilliver […], →OCLC, pages 15–16:

     Firſt in that Pow’r [to whoſe eternal thought / No outward object e’er one image brought, / The part, the whole, the ſee-er and the ſeen, / No diſtance, inference, or act between:] / Reason preſides, diffuſing thence abroad / Thro’ truth, thro’ things—the Teſt, the Point of God.

   • 1922 October 19, “The Search for New Parties”, in The New York Times‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 17 June 2025:

     Little groups of men and women […] occasionally raise their shrill clamor for a new party. It seems so easy to them to create one out of hand, and to make it perfect from the start. It would contain, by definition, all the forward-looking, all the true lovers of liberty, all the sympathetic spirits that call upon the rest to make sacrifices for the common good, all the dreamers of dreams and see-ers of visions.

   • 1963, Wei Wu Wei [pseudonym; Terence James Stannus Gray], “Looking in the Right Direction”, in Ask the Awakened: The Negative Way, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, →OCLC, part III (Absolute Absence), page 171:

     ‘Seeing everything as Mind itself’ means rather ‘As Mind itself, seeing everything’: it is a displacement of the see-er from being a see-er of pseudo-objects to being ‘Mind itself’. The see-er was an object himself, and so a pseudo-see-er.

   • 1980, Stanley Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”, in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, →ISBN, part 2 (Interpretive Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism), page 335:

     And, moreover, the way of seeing, whatever it was, would never be individual or idiosyncratic, since its source would always be the institutional structure of which the “see-er” was an extending agent.

   • 2000 May, V. Lallitha, “The Path to Moksha”, in T. R. Ramachandran, editor, Tattvāloka: The Splendour of Truth, volume XXIII, number 1, Sringeri, Karnataka: T. R. Ramachandran for Sri Abhinava Vidyatheertha Mahaswamigal Education Trust, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 27, column 1:

     The discovery of poornatvam lies in understanding the difference between the seen and the see-er. The seen and the see-er concept is beautifully explained by Adi Sankara’s Drig Drishya Viveka. / Seen and See-er Concept / “Let us suppose that there is a pot before us. It is seen and I am the see-er. I see it with my eye, and therefore the eye is the see-er. […]”

   • [2001, “Are there any English words containing the same letter three times in a row?”, in AskOxford‎^[2], Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, archived from the original on 21 August 2001, Frequently Asked Questions:

     A person who flees is a fleer, and a person who sees is a seer (though to avoid confusion with seer meaning `foreteller', the forms see-er and seeër have been used).]

   • 2006, Adrian Gostick, Chester Elton, “The See-er”, in The Invisible Employee: Realizing the Hidden Potential in Everyone, Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, pages 42–43:

     Walking home, shoulders slouched, head down, Ian didn’t look like the first See-er in hundreds of years. But already, he was. That night he slept fitfully, dreaming of things changing: Mud huts turning into houses. Weeds blossoming into flowers. He woke, wadded up his pillow, and turned oven unaware that building inside him was the answer that would soon change everything.