Eye

How to spell eye

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce eye

What does eye mean?

1. nounThe organ in the head with which a person or animal sees.
2. verbTo look at someone or something closely or with suspicion.

Eye in a sentence

• noun

  The optician shone a bright light into her left eye.

• verb

  Shoppers tend to eye the discounted shelves first.

• noun

  A speck of dust in his eye made it water all morning.

• verb

  The guard would eye every visitor with quiet suspicion.

Where does eye come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English eage, meaning the organ of sight, which in turn came from a shared Germanic ancestor that also produced the German Auge and the Dutch oog. Linguists trace it back further to an ancient Indo-European root that likewise gave Latin its oculus, the source of words such as 'ocular' and 'binoculars'. The Old English eage was gradually worn down in pronunciation and spelling over the medieval period, and by the time of Middle English it was being written in forms like 'eie' and 'ye'. The modern spelling keeps the silent 'e' on each side of the 'y', a layout that no longer matches how we say the word and which is the main reason careful adults still pause over it. The same root branched out into many compounds we use daily, including 'eyebrow', 'eyelid', and 'eyewitness'.

How the word is built

• eye (from Old English eage: the organ of sight); a single, unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like eye

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• aye: An expression of agreement or assent meaning 'yes', used especially in voting and in nautical reply.
• i: The first-person singular pronoun, used by a speaker or writer to refer to themselves as the subject of a sentence.