Eyed

How to spell eyed

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce eyed

What does eyed mean?

1. verbLooked at someone or something closely, often with interest, desire, or suspicion.

Eyed in a sentence

• She eyed the last slice of cake with obvious hunger.

• The security guard eyed the newcomers with suspicion as they entered.

Where does eyed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word eye descends from the Old English eage, meaning the organ of sight, which traces back to a shared Germanic root and ultimately to an ancient Indo-European source that also gave Latin oculus (eye) and the words 'ocular' and 'optic' through related branches. Over the centuries the spelling drifted from eage through Middle English forms such as eie and ye before settling into the modern eye, leaving behind a spelling that no longer matches its pronunciation. The verb sense, meaning to look at or watch closely, grew naturally out of the noun and was in regular use by the 1500s. Adding the ordinary past-tense suffix -ed produces eyed, and because the silent letters of eye are kept intact the result looks far stranger than it sounds. The trap for writers is that eyed sounds exactly like the contraction 'I'd', so the eye spelling has to be recalled deliberately rather than by ear.

How the word is built

• eye (from Old English eage: the organ of sight)
• -ed (past-tense verb suffix)