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say it: pur-IF-ur-uhl
peripheral is an adjective and noun meaning "on or near an edge or constituting an outer boundary; the outer area". It carries 3 recorded senses.
on or near an edge or constituting an outer boundary; the outer area
“Russia's peripheral provinces”
“peripheral suburbs”
related to the key issue but not of central importance
“a peripheral interest”
“energy is far from a peripheral issue in the economy”
“peripheral issues”
electronic equipment external to the circuit board that contains the CPU of a computer
“disk drives and printers are important peripherals”
computer science
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for peripheral come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.