Word.ws English Dictionary

deoculate

deoculate verb: to remove the eyes or their equivalent from (someone).

Verb

deoculate (third-person singular simple present deoculates, present participle deoculating, simple past and past participle deoculated)

  1. To remove the eyes or their equivalent from (someone).
    • "Lear" and "We Come to the River" have much in common, beyond the scene of deoculating the straitjacketed protagonist: images of brutality, executions, and jubilation; of soldiers starting to question their orders ("They make you do things no one should even have to dream of and cheer you when...1976, The New Yorker - Volume 52, Part 5, page 188
    • Big Mac's cancer is miraculously cured when he deoculates one of the severed heads and sinks them both out in the bay.1984, Books and Bookmen, page 25

Examples of deoculate in a sentence

  • Sadly deoculated by his enemy, the Genji, after defeat, Kagekiyo lives out his days in darkened solitude, visited finally by his long-lost daughter.2002, Timon Screech, The Lens Within the Heart:
  • Lucy had beautiful eyes, so she was deoculated as a martyrdom?2010, Nick Gevers, Marty Halpern, Is Anybody Out There?:

Forms of deoculate

third-person singular presentdeoculates
present participledeoculating
past participledeoculated
pastdeoculated

Origin of deoculate

From de- + oculo- + -ate (verb-forming suffix); coined by Charles Lamb in a letter to William Wordsworth written in 1816: "Dorothy, I hear, has mounted spectacles; so deoculated two of your dearest relations in life. ".

Questions about deoculate

What does deoculate mean?
Deoculate means to remove the eyes or their equivalent from (someone).
How do you use deoculate in a sentence?
Sadly deoculated by his enemy, the Genji, after defeat, Kagekiyo lives out his days in darkened solitude, visited finally by his long-lost daughter.
What part of speech is deoculate?
Deoculate is a verb.
What is the past tense of deoculate?
The past tense of deoculate is deoculated.

Words near deoculate in the dictionary

  1. deoccupation
  2. deoccupied
  3. deoccupies
  4. deoccupy
  5. deoccupying
  6. deoculate
  7. deoculated
  8. deoculates
  9. deoculating
  10. deodand
  11. deodands

Source and license

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