Eyewitness

How to spell eyewitness

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce eyewitness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eyewitness mean?

1. nounA person who personally saw an event happen and can describe or testify to it.
2. adjectiveBased on what a person saw directly, rather than on hearsay or reports.

Eyewitness in a sentence

• noun

  The police asked every eyewitness to give a statement about the crash.

• adjective

  Her eyewitness account of the accident matched the camera footage.

• noun

  As the only eyewitness to the robbery, she was called to court.

• adjective

  The jury found the eyewitness testimony more convincing than the rumours.

Where does eyewitness come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'eye' with 'witness'. The first element comes from Old English 'eage', the organ of sight, which traces back to a shared Germanic root and is related to Latin 'oculus'. The second element comes from Old English 'witnes', meaning 'knowledge, testimony, or attestation', itself built on 'witan', meaning 'to know', the same root that gives us 'wit' and 'wise'. The compound 'eyewitness' appears in English from the early 1500s to name someone who can testify to what they personally saw, as opposed to someone reporting hearsay. The spelling trap is simply that two whole words are fused with no space and no linking letter, so the doubled-up middle (the 'e' of eye meeting the 'w' of witness) and the single 's' ending catch writers out.

How the word is built

• eye (the organ of sight)
• witness (one who sees or testifies, from Old English witnes 'knowledge, testimony')