Word.ws English Dictionary

dead-eyed

dead-eyed adjective: having eyes that lack emotion or seem vacant.

Adjective

dead-eyed (comparative more dead-eyed, superlative most dead-eyed)

  1. Having eyes that lack emotion or seem vacant.
    • […]they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitalia-doodles on their college-rule note-pads, […]1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest […], Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 911
    • The prisoners watched me from inside their cells, watched dead-eyed and silent as I was dragged past.2011, Andrew Klavan, The Final Hour, Thomas Nelson, →ISBN, page 20

Examples of dead-eyed in a sentence

  • The dead-eyed man regarded me without the slightest change of expression.2011, Joe Schreiber, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, Houghton Mifflin, →ISBN, pages 132–133:
  • With a staggering walk, ragged clothes, and a terrifying dead-eyed stare, the zombie is an instantly recognizable monster of the big screen.2013, Janos Jantner, Drawing Horror-Movie Monsters, The Rosen Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 18:

Forms of dead-eyed

comparativemore dead-eyed
superlativemost dead-eyed

Questions about dead-eyed

What does dead-eyed mean?
Dead-eyed means having eyes that lack emotion or seem vacant.
How do you use dead-eyed in a sentence?
The dead-eyed man regarded me without the slightest change of expression.
What part of speech is dead-eyed?
Dead-eyed is an adjective.

Words near dead-eyed in the dictionary

  1. dead-ending
  2. dead-ends
  3. dead-eye
  4. dead-eye Dick
  5. dead-eye Dicks
  6. dead-eyed
  7. dead-eyes
  8. dead-handed
  9. dead-handedness
  10. dead-hearted
  11. dead-heartedly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead-eyed (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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