eye-winker

English

Noun

eye-winker (plural eye-winkers)

  1. (colloquial, US, dated) An eyelash.[1]
    • 1858, Rose Terry Cooke, “Eben Jackson” in Somebody’s Neighbors, Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881, p. 8,
      She never said nothin’ for a minute; she flushed all up as red as a rose, and I see her little fingers was shakin’, and her eye-winkers shiny and wet […]
    • 1872, Mark Twain, Roughing It, Hartford: American Publishing Company, Chapter 61, p. 442,
      One ear was sot back on his [the cat’s] neck, ’n’ his tail was stove up, ’n’ his eye-winkers was swinged [sic] off, ’n’ he was all blacked up with powder an’ smoke, an’ all sloppy with mud ’n’ slush f’m one end to the other.
    • 1878, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives, New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, Chapter 9, p. 94,
      The oxen that drew his sled were sleek, well-fed beasts, the pride of Zeph’s heart, and as the red sunlight darted across the snowy hills their breath steamed up, a very luminous cloud of vapor, which in a few moments congealed in sparkling frost lines on their patient eye-winkers and every little projecting hair around their great noses.
    • 1920, Zane Grey, The Man of the Forest, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Chapter 20, p. 287,
      “Shore I’d stood there—stock-still—an’ never moved an eye-winker.”
    • 1939, Robert P. T. Coffin, Captain Abby and Captain John, New York: Macmillan, Chapter 17, p. 296,
      John saw a whale and let the boys up out of their caulked cabin to have a look at him. He was a sixty-footer. He sailed along with them companionable as could be. Freddie could count the eye-winkers, he said, by his little dark eyes.

References
  1. Compare John Jamieson, A Dictionary of the Scottish Language, abridged by John Johnstone, Edinburgh: William Tait, 1846, p. 222: “EE-WINKERS, s. The eye-lashes.”
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