eye-watering
eye-watering adjective: having an odour, vapours or smoke which causes irritation to the eyes.
Adjective
eye-watering (comparative more eye-watering, superlative most eye-watering)
- Having an odour, vapours or smoke which causes irritation to the eyes.
- Having an extremely bad odour.
- Synonyms:
- foul-smelling
- So expensive that (figuratively) it would make one's eyes water.
- Toyota is developing a hydrogen fuel cell car, but the research and development costs are eye-watering. By contrast, a British firm, Riversimple, is producing a cheap, compact two-seater, which will probably come to dominate the small car market, particularly for drivers who cannot plug in a car at...2021 January 25, Chris Barker, Dr Robin Russell-Jones, “Electric cars are not the only green solution”, in The Guardian
- Both residents and drivers know that the cost of the current proposals to improve the A628 from Mottram all the way to the Flouch Inn has already reached eye-watering billions.2021 November 17, “Open Access: Hope for Woodhead”, in RAIL, number 944, page 64
- Synonyms:
- 5-star, big-ticket, chargeful, cheap at half the price, costful, costly, cost-prohibitive, fancy, dear, dearthful
- Of a shocking or surprising nature.
- Synonyms:
- astounding, astonishing, awesome, random, shocking, spontaneous, sudden, surprise, heartstopping, surprising
Examples of eye-watering in a sentence
- Toyota is developing a hydrogen fuel cell car, but the research and development costs are eye-watering.2021 January 25, Chris Barker, Dr Robin Russell-Jones, “Electric cars are not the only green solution”, in The Guardian:
- With food prices at a record high, inflation at its highest in three decades, fuel prices topping $3 a litre and eye-watering housing costs, Labour has been paying for it in the polls.2022 May 13, Eva Corlett, “As the shine comes off NZ Labour, Grant Robertson hopes his budget can steady the ship”, in The Guardian:
- “That means decisions of eye-watering difficulty,” he said.2022 October 17, Jeremy Hunt, quotee, “Jeremy Hunt shreds Truss’s economic plans in astounding U-turn on tax”, in The Guardian:
Synonyms of eye-watering
- foul-smelling
- 5-star
- big-ticket
- cheap at half the price
- costly
- cost-prohibitive
- fancy
- dear
- ex
- expenny
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of eye-watering
| comparative | more eye-watering |
|---|---|
| superlative | most eye-watering |
| alternative form | eyewatering |
Origin of eye-watering
From eye + watering.
Questions about eye-watering
- What does eye-watering mean?
- Eye-watering means having an odour, vapours or smoke which causes irritation to the eyes.
- How do you use eye-watering in a sentence?
- Toyota is developing a hydrogen fuel cell car, but the research and development costs are eye-watering.
- What part of speech is eye-watering?
- Eye-watering is an adjective.
Words near eye-watering in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: eye-watering (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “eye-watering.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/eye-watering. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.