blear

adj

1. Dim; unclear from water or rheum.

   “A Promontory Wen, with grieſly grace, Stood high, upon the Handle of his Face: His blear Eyes ran in gutters to his Chin: His Beard was stubble, and his Cheeks were thin.”

   “The Devil, now disguised as a half-wit peasant to Lars-Goren’s left, stood grinning, his blear eyes glittering.”

2. Causing or caused by dimness of sight.

   “Thus I hurle My dazling spells into the ſpungie aire Of power to cheate the eye with bleare illuſion, And give it falſe preſentments, […]”

verb

1. (intransitive)To be blear; to have blear eyes; to look or gaze with blear eyes.

   “18th c., attributed to Jonathan Swift, “The Story of Orpheus, Burlesqued,” in Walter Scott (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 2nd edition, 1883, Volume 10, p. 403, Orpheus, a one-eyed blearing Thracian, The crowder of that barb’rous nation, Was ballad-singer by vocation;”

   “The street-lamps blearing thro’ the rainy rout, Each like a winking, sickly evil-eye.”

   “1917, Madge Morris, The “Red Wind Blows” in The Lure of the Desert Land and Other Poems, San Francisco: Har Wagner, p. 83, Let loose thy snow-winged dove, to rise And fly across the seething blood-mad world. To flutter over fields where that dread Silence is! To light on upturned faces blearing at the skies And curiously peck at dead men’s eyes.”

2. (transitive)To make (usually the eyes or eyesight) blurred or dim.

   “your ſelf you cannot ſo diſguiſe:”

   “Here’s Lucentio, right ſonne to the right Vincentio, That haue by marriage made thy daughter mine, While counterfeit ſuppoſes bleer’d thine eine.”

   “[…] if it come to prohibiting, there is not ought more likely to be prohibited then truth it ſelf; whoſe firſt appearance to our eyes blear’d and dimm’d with prejudice and cuſtom, is more unſightly and unplauſible then many errors, ev’n as the perſon is of many a great man ſlight and contemptible to ſee to.”

   “[…] I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.”

   “The latter looked out with three tiers of vacant melancholy windows, which were blank and dreary, save that here and there a “To Let” card had developed like a cataract upon the bleared panes.”

3. (transitive)To blur, make blurry.

   “When winter blears bleakly the forest, And the water binds gray to its blue, Safe and sound in her covert I leave her, Till spring calls again my canoe.”

   “1888, David Atwood Wasson, “Babes of God” Part II in Poems, Boston: Lee & Shepard, p. 36, Now, one among the foremost, looking up By chance, with horror saw, in farthest sky Fronting their course, a troublous film of cloud,— A strange, dark, troublous film of cloud,— Blearing the beauty of the crystal wall.”

   “He stared at but did not see the bleared reflection of the flanking cherubs a hundred feet above the steel-grey veneer of water.”

4. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative form of blare