The Collaborative International Dictionary
Looker \Look"er\, n.
One who looks.
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A person who is physically very attractive, especially a beautiful woman.
Looker-on, a spectator; an onlooker; one that looks on, but has no agency or part in an affair.
Did not this fatal war affront thy coast, Yet sattest thou an idle looker-on ?
--Fairfax.
Wiktionary
alt. A spectator, onlooker. n. A spectator, onlooker.
WordNet
n. someone who looks on [syn: onlooker]
Usage examples of "looker-on".
It was so evident to all Sancerre that no two of these three men would ever leave the third alone with Madame de la Baudraye, that their jealousy was a comedy to the lookers-on.
As I understand it, from what I have seen and heard since my arrival in Shadowland, ghosts are mere lookers-on at the feast of life, and not in any sense participants.
We supped merrily, and after supper we began our sports again, the syndic remaining as usual a mere looker-on, and well pleased with his part. I treated each of the three nymphs to two courses, deceiving them whenever I was forced by nature to do so.
We came to a chamber in which I saw a table, a chair, a small toiletglass and a bed with the straw palliasse turned over, very likely for the purpose of allowing the looker-on to suppose that there were sheets underneath, but I was particularly disgusted by a certain smell, the cause of which was recent.
And at Acle Bridge there are always lookers-on, waiting to enjoy the misfortunes of the unskilled.
If you could imagine anyone obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.
Among the lookers-on there was the same expression in all quarters of the court.
Something especially reckless in his demeanour not only gave him a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong resemblance he undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary earnestness, when they were compared together, had strengthened), that many of the lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one another they would hardly have thought the two were so alike.
He knew what the lookers-on were thinking, and he felt some secret amusement in their seeing what good friends he was with this youngster, who might have been expected to share the popular opinion of him.