When I use a word: The eyes have it (2024)

Etymologically speaking, a doublet is a pair of words that have the same origin but different spellings and often different meanings. English is replete with such pairs, as the following examples show:

Then there are triplets. They include cloak/cloche/clock, pauper/poor/poverty, coign(e)/coin/quoin, and regime/regimen/regiment (about which I have previously written—BMJ 1996;313:776). And there is the septuplet antler/augur/eye/inveigle/ocular/ullage/window.

Let's start with the Indo-European root OC, which gave the Latin word for an eye, oculus. This gives us words such as ocular, inoculate, and some words that contain the syllable -oc-: atrocity from atrox (black looking), ferocity from ferox (fierce looking), and velocity from velox (lively looking). An ocelot has eyes on its skin, but that is purely coincidental; the word comes from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word ocelotl, a jaguar.

OC also gave the Homeric word for a pair of eyes ο ςςε (osse), from which came ωψ (ops), οφθαλμοσ (ophthalmos), and ο μμα (omma, originally opma), giving us words such as optic, myopic, autopsy, ophthalmic, and ommateum (the compound eye of insects). The metope, the bit beyond the eyes (see BMJ 2002;324:1022), is the forehead. OC also gave αυγη (auge) the light or eye of the sun; an augur in Latin was someone who could see into the future.

From oculus came the French word oeil. In Shakespeare's time an oeillade was an amorous glance or an ogle. Mistress Page, said Falstaff, “examined my parts with most judicious oeillades.” In Old French oeiller was to fill a cask to its eye or bunghole—to the eyeballs, as you might say. That gave oeillage, from which we get ullage, the amount by which a cask holds less than its full capacity.

Oculus also gave the German word Auge, the Old English word eage, and hence the English word eye. A daisy is the day's eye, and an ox-eye is a type of chrysanthemum that looks like a daisy, although confusingly the Michaelmas daisy is an aster, because it resembles a star.

In Greek an ox-eye was βουφθαλμον, which gives us buphthalmos, or a large eyeball associated with glaucoma. Because of its shape, an ox-eye or oeil-de-boeuf was also a small round window. And window itself is not (as some have thought) from the wind's door, but from the Old Norse word vindauga, the wind's eye. Not for nothing is the eye called the window of the soul.

The French derived aveugle either from the Latin aboculus, eyeless (like amens, mindless), or perhaps from what Pliny in his Naturalis Historia called albugines oculorum, white opaque spots on the corneae. Aveugle means blind, from which we get inveigle, to pull the wool over your eyes.

And finally, an antler is the (ramum) ante ocularis, the branched structure situated in front of the eyes. Although that derivation may be all my eye.