Word.ws English Dictionary

bird's-eye

/ˈbɜː(ɹ)dz ˈaɪ/

bird's-eye adjective: having spots resembling the eyes of a bird.

Adjective

bird's-eye (not comparable)

  1. Having spots resembling the eyes of a bird.
  2. As if viewed from an altitude; panoramic.
    • There is also one of the woodblocks used to print Jacopo de’ Barbari’s revolutionary bird’s-eye panorama of Venice and the lagoon, from 1500.2016 May 5, Roderick Conway Morris, “In Venice, the Power of the Press on Display”, in The New York Times
    • In the 1970s Thiebaud became increasingly interested in landscapes and cityscapes that he painted from a bird’s-eye perspective. In “Potrero Hill” a painting from the mid-1970s, he jammed freeways, hills and buildings together in a steep vertical of color and light.2021 December 26, Mary Rourke, “Wayne Thiebaud, prolific California painter and teacher, dies at 101”, in Los Angeles Times

Noun

IPA/ˈbɜː(ɹ)dzaɪ/

bird's-eye (countable and uncountable, plural bird's-eyes)

  1. A fabric having a pattern of small circles or diamonds with a spot in each centre.
  2. A kind of tobacco.
  3. A figure found in wood, especially hard maple, resembling tiny swirling eyes disrupting the smooth grain.
  4. (colloquial) A fermata (notation).

Forms of bird's-eye

Adjective
alternative formbird's eye
alternative formbirds eye
alternative formbirds-eye
alternative formbirdseye
Noun
pluralbird's-eyes

Words formed from bird's-eye

Phrases with bird's-eye

Questions about bird's-eye

What does bird's-eye mean?
Bird's-eye means having spots resembling the eyes of a bird.
What part of speech is bird's-eye?
Bird's-eye can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce bird's-eye?
Bird's-eye is pronounced /ˈbɜː(ɹ)dz ˈaɪ/.

Words near bird's-eye in the dictionary

  1. bird's nest soups
  2. bird's nest swing
  3. bird's nest swings
  4. bird's nests
  5. bird's pepper
  6. bird's-eye
  7. bird's-eye maple
  8. bird's-eye view
  9. bird's-eye views
  10. bird's-eyes
  11. bird's-foot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bird's-eye (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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