tear [OE] The word tear meaning ‘to pull apart’ is found in Old English. To tear someone off a strip, or rebuke them angrily as if by pulling off a strip of their skin, was originally RAF slang, and is recorded from the 1940s. The tear that you shed in distress is a different word, still Old English. The expression without tears, for learning, first appears in the title of a book for children published in 1857, Reading without Tears or, A pleasant method of learning to read. The person whose works were first called tearjerkers, in 1921, was James Whitcomb Riley, a US writer known for sentimental poems such as ‘Little Orphan Annie’. See also crocodile.