Deadeyes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An individual who shows no emotion or response in their gaze, often implying a lack of feeling or empathy
2. A person with a stare that suggests lifelessness or emotional detachment, making them seem unsympathetic
3. Someone characterized by an expressionless or vacant look in their eyes, indicating a disconnection from emotional states

Etymology: "Deadeyes" is the plural of "deadeye," a compound of "dead" and "eye." The pairing comes from the nautical world, where a deadeye is a flat, round wooden block with holes through it, used with rope to tighten a ship's rigging. Sailors used "dead" in the sense of stationary or fixed in place, as in the term for a ship's motionless position relative to the water, and the wooden block was fixed to the ship's side, holding the shrouds taut. The "eye" part refers to the hole or ring, which is the same sense as an eye in a needle or a loop of rope. The sense of a blank, emotionless stare follows from this picture of fixedness. A face that holds still and gives nothing away looks like the unmoving block, its openings fixed and unreadable. The shift from a fixture on a sailing vessel to a description of a human gaze is an extension of the same idea of stillness, though the everyday figurative use is what most speakers encounter now.

Synonyms: sailing blocks