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private eye
noun
- a private detective.
private eye
noun
- informal.a private detective
Word History and Origins
Origin of private eye1
Idioms and Phrases
A privately employed detective, as opposed to one working for the police or another authority. For example, The children loved stories about private eyes, and Janey wanted to become one . This expression comes from the term private investigator , the “i” of investigator being changed to “eye,” which plays on the idea of a person looking into things. [1930s]Example Sentences
The standard assignments, and the ones that truly built Kroll’s fortune, are undertaken for law firms and corporations, which regularly hire private eyes to gather evidence in legal disputes, run background checks or scope out takeover targets.
The idea of forcing private eyes to disclose their clients and tactics to a federal regulator have come up in some recent books and opinion pieces.
In a sense, they are the private eyes of the state’s public data, as they investigate the backstories of new coronavirus cases displayed each day on the Illinois Department of Public Health’s dashboard.
His college classmate, Bill Marshall, is a South Florida private eye.
Johnny Depp has a pretty sizeable role in Tusk as the Montreal private eye Guy LaPointe.
The hero is Lucas Spero, a veteran of the wars in the Middle East and a tough guy private eye.
And Cormoran Strike is a private eye whose company I would share again no matter whose name is on the dust jacket.
His widow gave the private eye a box full of tapes marked “JACKSON” that her husband had been working on.
I felt like flashing a twenty at him like a private eye did in the old tough-books, but I knew it wouldn't work.
Morays professions to Elizabeth may have been a blind, but his letters for Marys private eye have a more genuine air.
In his pocket was a great bunch of newspaper clippings, intended for the private eye of the new Mrs. De Foe's one-time secretary.
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Definitions 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.
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