Word.ws English Dictionary

cockeye

cockeye noun: an eye affected by strabismus.

Noun

cockeye (plural cockeyes)

  1. An eye affected by strabismus.
    • How dared that miserable wretch cast his eye—his cock[-]eye, as Vroom had truly said—on Etta. It gave him a kind of grim pleasure to dwell on Looten's physical defect.1894, Louis Zangwill, A Drama in Dutch, page 168
    • “Fine day, gents,” said he, focusing his cockeye.1920, William Patterson White, Lynch Lawyers, page 257
  2. The socket in the ball of a millstone, which sits on the cockhead.

Examples of cockeye in a sentence

  • His cockeye ogled the pile of food sitting on the table.2011, Bea L. Brown, Wally the Cockeyed Cricket:
  • As flies swarmed around a nearby outhouse, Molly B eyed him for a moment, looking him up and down with a cockeye that seemed to have a life of its own.2019, Bill Bishop, Two Hearts, page 9:

Forms of cockeye

pluralcockeyes
alternative formcock-eye
alternative formcock eye

Origin of cockeye

From cock + eye. See cock (“to turn up”).

Questions about cockeye

What does cockeye mean?
Cockeye means an eye affected by strabismus.
How do you use cockeye in a sentence?
His cockeye ogled the pile of food sitting on the table.
What part of speech is cockeye?
Cockeye is a noun.
What is the plural of cockeye?
The plural of cockeye is cockeyes.

Words near cockeye in the dictionary

  1. cocket-bread
  2. cocketh
  3. cockets
  4. Cockett
  5. cockey
  6. cockeye
  7. cockeyed
  8. cockeyedly
  9. cockeyedness
  10. cockeyes
  11. cockeying

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cockeye (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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Cite this entry: “cockeye.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cockeye. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.