Meanings
plural thousand-yard stares · alternative thousand yard stare
- informalgovernmentA blank, unfocused glance given by a traumatized person, especially a soldier who has seen combat.
Synonyms: thousand-mile stare, hundred-yard stare
Synonyms & antonyms
nounA blank, unfocused glance given by a traumatized person, especially a soldier who has seen combat.
Origin
Such terms are usually said to have originated in the usage of soldiers and the physicians who treated them for combat wounds and combat stress. A search of a large corpus finds thousand-yard stare attested during World War II (citations from 1943 to 1945), naming a symptom of social isolation in far-flung posts or of combat stress; the absence of attestations of *-yard stare and *-year stare from before 1943 suggests that perhaps this symptom (from any mentally traumatic cause) was not called by these names until the 1940s. In contrast, the thematically related term shell shock was in use during World War I.
Full word history & related roots →Translations
Polish thousand-yard stare
- thousand-yard stareTranslations
Portuguese olhar de mil jardas
- olhar de mil jardasTranslations
Cite this entry
thousand-yard stare. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/thousand-yard%20stare
“thousand-yard stare.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/thousand-yard%20stare. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “thousand-yard stare,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/thousand-yard%20stare.
Source: thousand-yard stare on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.