Lens

How to spell lens

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lens

What does lens mean?

1. nounA curved piece of glass or other transparent material that bends light to focus or magnify an image.
2. nounThe transparent structure inside the eye that focuses light onto the retina.

Lens in a sentence

• The camera lens was smudged with a fingerprint.

• Cataract surgery replaces the clouded lens inside the eye.

• A magnifying lens helped him read the tiny serial number.

• With age the lens in the eye loses some flexibility.

Where does lens come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes directly from the Latin lens, which literally meant 'lentil', the small flat-rounded pulse eaten across the ancient Mediterranean. Early scientists noticed that a piece of glass ground thick in the middle and thin at the edges had exactly the double-convex shape of a lentil seed, so they borrowed the vegetable's name for it. English adopted the term in the late 1600s, during the great age of telescopes and microscopes, keeping the Latin spelling intact. The same root survives in 'lentil' itself and in the adjective 'lenticular', meaning shaped like a lens. Because the word is the bare Latin noun, it has no silent letters or odd combinations; the only real trap is that the singular ends in a plain 's', tempting writers to add an 'e' and write 'lense'.

How the word is built

• lens (from Latin lens: lentil, named for its lentil-like shape)