compound eye

American  

noun

1. an arthropod eye subdivided into many individual, light-receptive elements, each including a lens, a transmitting apparatus, and retinal cells.

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compound eye British  

noun

1. the convex eye of insects and some crustaceans, consisting of numerous separate light-sensitive units (ommatidia) See also ocellus

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compound eye Scientific  

1. An eye consisting of hundreds or thousands of tiny light-sensitive parts (called ommatidia), with each part serving to focus light on the retina to create a portion of an image. Most insects and some crustaceans have compound eyes.

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Etymology

Origin of compound eye

First recorded in 1830–40

Example Sentences

In contrast, the smaller eyespots in certain chitons function more like individual pixels, or the compound eye of an insect, forming a visual sensor distributed over the chiton's shell.

From Science Daily • Mar. 4, 2024

The enclosed, utopian space of Arcadia, with its cultic leaders and its ragged freedoms, is brilliantly brought to life, the details absorbed by the restless, compound eye of an impressionable child.

From The New Yorker • Nov. 2, 2015

An insect's compound eye is an engineering marvel: high resolution, wide field of view, and incredible sensitivity to motion, all in a compact package.

From Science Magazine • May 1, 2013

A sea urchin's hundreds of feet may act as one giant compound eye, allowing them to see just as well as a horseshoe crab or nautilus, both of which have genuine, if primitive, eyes.

From Scientific American • Aug. 20, 2012

He also described the structure of feathers, the nature of a butterfly’s wing and the compound eye of the fly, among many observations of the living world.

From "The Scientists" by John Gribbin