Word of the Day

: August 23, 2010

squinny

verb SKWIN-ee

What It Means

: to look or peer with eyes partly closed : squint

squinny in Context

"I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign / That this was still the town that had been 'mine'…." (Philip Larkin, "I Remember, I Remember")

Did You Know?

"I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me?" So asks Shakespeare's mad King Lear of blind Gloucester, marking the first use of the verb "squinny" in 1605. It is likely that Shakespeare formed the word from an earlier English word "squin," meaning "with the eye directed to one side." Shakespeare also uses the more familiar "squint" in King Lear: "This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet.… He gives the web and the pin, / squints the eye, and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, / and hurts the poor creature of earth." Although this is not the first known use of the verb "squint," which appears in print six years earlier, it is the first known use of the verb's transitive sense.