Word.ws English Dictionary

eye-wateringly

eye-wateringly adverb: in a manner or to a degree that causes one’s eyes to water or tear up, often due to an emotional situation or sentimental feelings, or due to shocking or exciting events.

Adverb

eye-wateringly (comparative more eye-wateringly, superlative most eye-wateringly)

  1. In a manner or to a degree that causes one’s eyes to water or tear up, often due to an emotional situation or sentimental feelings, or due to shocking or exciting events.
    • Another Indonesian soup, asam shrimp […], includes incredibly fresh shrimp in their shells and okra in a tamarind broth that is wonderfully tart and sweet and eye-wateringly spicy.1994 April 8, Eric Asimov, “Arts”, in New York Times
    • It is first and foremost a literary prize, something I have to keep telling myself after reading the umpteenth eye-wateringly explicit gay sex scene.2012 June 7, Suzi Feay, “Where are the new UK lesbian writers?”, in The Guardian

Forms of eye-wateringly

comparativemore eye-wateringly
superlativemost eye-wateringly
alternative formeyewateringly

Questions about eye-wateringly

What does eye-wateringly mean?
Eye-wateringly means in a manner or to a degree that causes one’s eyes to water or tear up, often due to an emotional situation or sentimental feelings, or due to shocking or exciting events.
What part of speech is eye-wateringly?
Eye-wateringly is an adverb.

Words near eye-wateringly in the dictionary

  1. Eye-tie
  2. eye-to-eye
  3. eye-tooth
  4. Eye-tye
  5. eye-watering
  6. eye-wateringly
  7. eye-winker
  8. eye-winkers
  9. eye-witness
  10. eye-witnesses
  11. eye-word

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: eye-wateringly (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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