Eyeball

How to spell eyeball

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce eyeball

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eyeball mean?

1. nounThe roughly spherical globe of the eye, especially as seen within the socket.
2. verbTo look at or measure something roughly by sight, without precise tools.

Eyeball in a sentence

• noun

  The optician shone a light onto each eyeball during the examination.

• verb

  The carpenter chose to eyeball the gap rather than reach for the tape measure.

• noun

  Rubbing your eyeball too hard can irritate the delicate surface.

• verb

  Most bakers eyeball the amount of flour instead of weighing it exactly.

Where does eyeball come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two very old native English words. 'Eye' descends from the Old English 'eage', a Germanic word for the organ of sight, while 'ball' comes from a Germanic root for a round object, reinforced in Middle English by the Old Norse 'bollr'. The two were joined to describe the roughly spherical shape of the eye, with 'eyeball' recorded from around the late 1500s. Because the eye is not perfectly round, the name stresses the round front globe rather than the whole organ. In the twentieth century the noun spawned a casual verb meaning to look hard at something or to judge a measurement by sight alone, and that informal sense remains common today.

How the word is built

• eye (the organ of sight)
• ball (round object)