cockeye

English

Alternative forms

• cock-eye, cock eye

Etymology

cock +‎ eye. See cock (“to turn up”).

Noun

cockeye (plural cockeyes)

1. An eye affected by strabismus.
   • 1894, Louis Zangwill, A Drama in Dutch, page 168:

     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.

   • 1920, William Patterson White, Lynch Lawyers, page 257:

     “Fine day, gents,” said he, focusing his cockeye.

   • 2006, Roy 'Chubby' Brown, Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown:

     The next time I saw Dave, he'd joined Deep Purple and had just got back from Sweden, where the band had sent their new lead singer to have his cock-eye straightened.

   • 2011, Bea L. Brown, Wally the Cockeyed Cricket:

     His cockeye ogled the pile of food sitting on the table. “Delicious!” he said with glee. The cockeyed cricket licked his lips […]

   • 2019, Bill Bishop, Two Hearts, page 9:

     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.

2. (engineering) The socket in the ball of a millstone, which sits on the cockhead.

Related terms

• cockeyed

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “cockeye”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)