eye-winker

plural eye-winkers

1. UScolloquialdatedAn eyelash.

   Shore I’d stood there—stock-still—an’ never moved an eye-winker.

   1920 January, Zane Grey, chapter XX, in The Man of the Forest […], New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, →OCLC, page 287

   4 more examples

   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 […]

   1858, Rose Terry Cooke, “Eben Jackson”, in Somebody’s Neighbors, Boston: James R. Osgood, published 1881, page 8

   One ear was sot back on his [the cat’s] neck, ’n’ his tail was stove up, ’n’ his eye-winkers was swinged^([sic – meaning singed]) 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.

   1870–1871 (date written), Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “”, in Roughing It, Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company [et al.], published 1872, →OCLC, page 442

   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.

   1878, Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Election Day in Poganuc”, in Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives, New York, N.Y.: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, →OCLC, page 94

   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.

   1939, Robert P. T. Coffin, chapter 17, in Captain Abby and Captain John, New York: Macmillan, page 296