Eyelashes

How to spell eyelashes

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce eyelashes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eyelashes mean?

1. nounThe fine hairs growing along the edges of the eyelids.

Eyelashes in a sentence

• The makeup tutorial showed how to curl your eyelashes before applying mascara.

• A speck of dust caught in her eyelashes made her blink repeatedly.

Where does eyelashes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound of two native English words, both descending from Old English. The first part, 'eye', comes from the Old English 'eage', which meant the organ of sight and traces back to the same ancient Germanic root that gave German 'Auge' and Dutch 'oog'. The second part, 'lash', originally referred to the flexible end of a whip and only later attached itself to the fine hairs lining the eyelid, probably because they too are slender, flicking strands. The combined word 'eyelash' is recorded in English from the early 1700s, with the plural 'eyelashes' formed in the ordinary way by adding -es after the -sh ending. That -es plural, demanded by the hissing 'sh' sound, is exactly the spelling point worth remembering, since 'eyelashs' would be wrong.

How the word is built

• eye (the organ of sight)
• lash (a flexible whip-like strand)
• -es (plural suffix)