Definition of "peeler"

(British, Ireland, Australia, slang) A police officer.  quotations

One who peels.  quotations

1. A person whose job it is to peel fruit or vegetable produce.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • She and I took a few minutes together once the belts began rolling with red tomatoes and with the shiny cans which clanked their hollow wind-chime twang as they paraded down the chute on the way to their own conveyor belts which ran parallel to the wide ones the tomatoes rode on. In order to get these few minutes she'd had to implement a schedule for the peelers, who were always fighting like schoolchildren to get to the front of the line to claim their places, vying for the best spots where they could grab the biggest tomatoes to fill their cans faster.

     2001, Marisa De Franceschi, Family Matters, page 26

2. A person who works by peeling the bark off trees.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • From about this time, it became customary to permit the peelers to appear annually before the government, immediately after the termination of the cinnamon-harvest.

     1833, Asiatic Journal, page 272

   • Women cooked and cleaned in the larger camps, where the peelers stayed for a month or more. A good peeler could make two cords of bark a day, felling hemlocks and peeling the bark off only the trunk below the first branch.

     2009, David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills, page 31

   • Females trained in household arts received good pay, while males sought jobs on large farms, as bark peelers at lumber mills or axmen for logging companies, and as track hands for the railroads.

     2009, Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance During the Early Reservation Years, 1850-1900

3. (derogatory, slang) A stripper; one who disrobes for entertainment.

4. (obsolete) One who peels or pillages.

A device for peeling fruit or vegetables.

1. A household utensil for peeling fruit or vegetables.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • I like to use a swivel peeler on my apples, mainly because a good peeler removes the skin only, without hacking off the flesh underneath the way a knife will, even in dept hands.

     2011, Ken Haedrich, Apple Pie

   • The OXO peeler was a game-changer. More than 10 million have been sold to date, and it threw open the entire market in peelers, causing numerous rivals to be invented: serrated fruit peelers, vegetable peelers with curved blades, Y-shaped and C-shaped and U-shaped peelers in any colour you desire (and many you don't).

     2012, Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

   • What the Romans didn't have was anything like the ergonomic vegetable peeler.

     2014, Mark McWilliams, Food & Material Culture

2. An industrial food-processing machine for removing the peels or skins.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • Fish-processing equipment consists of 33, 181, 189, 188, 694 Baader machines and others which would be replaced for six months by krill peelers with associated devices.

     1985, E. Budziński, P. Bykowski, D. Dutkiewicz, Possibilities of Processing and Marketing of Products Made from Antarctic Krill

   • Peelers with knife blades mounted in the outside walls of a revolving drum in which the product is tumbled have a similar effect as an abrasion peeler.

     1991, David Arthey, Colin Dennis, Vegetable Processing, page 52

   • The peels are removed mostly with wet peelers, using lye solutions or high-pressure steam.

     2002, George D. Saravacos, Athanasios E. Kostaropoulos, Handbook of Food Processing Equipment, page 253

   • Washers and peelers usually are cleaned in place, either with dedicated clean-in-place systems, or, more commonly, the equipment is simply filled with water and operated for a short period of time, followed by rinsing.

     2012, John A. Troller, Sanitation in Food Processing, page 337

Something to be peeled.  quotations  examples

Something that is peeling, about to peel, or prone to peeling.  quotations

1. An edible crab that is about to shed its shell.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • They bought peelers [crabs that would soon shed] and kept them in large wooden floats until the crabs shed.

     1986, Ruth Scarborough Tate, Suzanne Tate, Duck Tales: Folk Tales and Anecdotes

   • Once the crab has molted, the new shell takes about four days to harden. Just after shedding, the blue crab's shell is soft enough to eat. Watermen harvest soft shell crabs as peelers (about to shed), rank peelers (within hours of shedding) and busters (in the process of shedding).

     2007, Aliza Green, Field Guide to Seafood

   • It is rarer to find paired edible crabs, and potential peelers need to be tested.

     2013, Alan Vaughan, Mike Ladle, Hooked On Bass

(surfing) An ideal wave.  quotations  examples

(horticulture) A plant which impoverishes the soil by demanding high value nutrients and so requires the use of fertilizers.  examples

Someone who breaks horses.  quotations  examples