Eye-word
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A word encountered more often in writing than in speech, and thus liable to be pronounced incorrectly.
"We may hesitate whether "churl" is to be pronounced with a k or with a soft ch sound, because we do not use the word commonly in speech and hence it is becoming more of an eye-word than an ear-word."
Example
More examples"We may hesitate whether "churl" is to be pronounced with a k or with a soft ch sound, because we do not use the word commonly in speech and hence it is becoming more of an eye-word than an ear-word."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.