Binoculars

How to spell binoculars

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce binoculars

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does binoculars mean?

1. nounA handheld optical instrument with two tubes and lenses, used to view distant objects with both eyes.

Binoculars in a sentence

• She raised the binoculars to watch the eagle circling the ridge.

• A good pair of binoculars made the football match much easier to follow from the back row.

Where does binoculars come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word draws on two Latin roots: bini, meaning 'two together' or 'a pair', and oculus, meaning 'eye'. Scholars combined these to coin 'binocular' as an adjective for anything that uses both eyes at once, contrasting with 'monocular', which uses just one. The plural noun 'binoculars', for the twin-tubed optical instrument you hold to both eyes, settled into English in the nineteenth century as such devices became common for theatre, sport, and the field. The oculus root is a familiar one: it also gives us 'oculist', 'ocular', and the inner eye-piece called the 'eyepiece', and it explains why the spelling keeps that tricky 'ocul' rather than the sound-alike 'occu'. Remembering that there are two (bi-) eyes (ocul-) helps fix both the single 'n' and the single 'c' that trip many writers.

How the word is built

• bin- (two together, from Latin bini)
• ocul (eye, from oculus)
• -ar (relating to)
• -s (plural)