means To strip the outer skin, rind, or layer off something (or, of skin and surfaces, to come off in flakes or sheets).

from From Old English 'pilian,' to strip off skin or rind, drawn from Latin 'pilare,' to remove hair (from 'pilus,' a hair) — the same family that gives us 'depilatory.' The fruit-and-vegetable sense and the noun 'peel' for the rind grew up together with the verb. A separate but tangled cousin, 'peel' meaning to plunder or pillage, comes from Latin 'pilare' in its 'to pluck/rob' guise, and English long muddled the two spellings before settling things down.