eyeball
Americannoun
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eyeballs
plural
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the ball or globe of the eye.
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Informal. eyeballs, people who view or read something.
Old TV shows are getting a lot of eyeballs online.
verb (used with object)
idioms
noun
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the entire ball-shaped part of the eye
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in close confrontation
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of eyeball
1580–90; 1900–05 eyeball for def. 3; eye + ball 1
Explanation
Your eyeball is the round, ball-shaped part of your eye. When you go to an eye doctor, she will take a close look at your eyeballs. Every vertebrate — or animal with a spine — has eyeballs that sit within an eye socket. Your eyeballs are your organs of sight, making it possible for you to see light and color and to focus on the things you're looking at, sending all of these messages to your brain. You can also use the word eyeball, informally, as a verb: "Why do you always eyeball me when I walk by? Is it my strange hat?"
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
I got the hairy eyeball from fellow TV panelists when I said in 2019 that it was careless of the French to let Notre-Dame burn down.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 20, 2026
When you open them there needs to be a pleat, so when you close them there is enough skin to cover the eyeball.
From BBC ● Sep. 23, 2026
"I opened the package, and there was a giant, 200-year-old eyeball sitting on dry ice just staring back at me," the 28-year-old says with a laugh.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 23, 2026
The CG animals and aliens look stiff, other than a nifty close-up of an eyeball.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 10, 2026
That night, I pull out my eyeball journal.
From "A Good Kind of Trouble" by Lisa Moore Ramée
"There's going to be eyeballs on every player in the World Cup," Demetriou added.
From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2026
“We are now seeing the conversion of civilian surveillance into wartime intelligence collection,” said Alexander Leslie, a national-security expert at threat-intelligence consultants Recorded Future, who sees a global “soft underbelly” in omnipresent digital eyeballs.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 11, 2026
The researchers tested the method on 12 rabbit eyeballs.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 29, 2026
“I didn’t ever intend to have so many eyeballs turn to me and go, ’What are you doing now?’”
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2026
Some of their eyeballs bulged out while others were missing teeth or had wavy lines of bad smell coming off them.
From "When Dimple Met Rishi" by Sandhya Menon
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
