bullseye
Pluralbullseyes
Pluralbullseyes
- 1The center of a shooting target, lying inside the areas known as the inner and the magpie.
Each recruit had to place five rounds inside the bullseye before moving on to the long range.
On the paper target, the bullseye was a small black circle ringed by wider bands.
Note
On a shooting target the rings are named from the middle outward: bullseye, then inner, then magpie. The word itself joins bull's and eye, and it may go back to English archers, who are said to have tested their skill by shooting an arrow through the eye socket of a bull's skull. A shot that lands here takes the same name.
- 2A shot that lands in the center of a target.
Her first shot on the rifle range was a bullseye, and the instructor nodded in approval.
After a string of bullseyes, the young archer took first place at the county fair.
- 3Used in reply to a statement or guess to say that it is completely accurate.
"Let me guess: the printer jammed again?" "Bullseye," the office manager said.
"You're moving to Denver for the new job." "Bullseye. I start in March."
Similarexactly, bingo, correct
Note
Conversation borrows the shout at the target: a guess that lands exactly is treated like a shot in the center. The word works as a complete reply on its own, said straight after another person's claim or question, and it confirms the whole of what was said, not just part of it.
- 4Used as a cry when someone hits the center of a target.
The coach clapped and called out, "Bullseye!" as the arrow struck dead center.
"Bullseye!" the carnival worker announced as the boy's ball smacked into the middle of the dunk-tank target.
- 5The two rings at the very center of a dartboard.
She needed the bullseye to finish the game, and her last dart landed just outside it.
His dart caught the outer ring of the bullseye rather than the tiny center spot.
Similarbull
Note
Darts gives the word two rings rather than one: a narrow outer ring around a small inner circle, where the shooting target's center is a single zone. Players often shorten it to bull and tell the parts apart as the outer bull and the inner bull, and the inner circle is the one worth more.
- 6A striped, peppermint-flavored hard candy.
He unwrapped a bullseye and let the sharp peppermint clear his head before the meeting.
The old candy store still sells bullseyes from tall glass jars behind the counter.
- 7A slice of bread with a hole cut in the middle and an egg fried in the hole.
He pressed a glass into a slice of bread to cut the hole for a bullseye, then cracked an egg into it.
The diner on Main Street serves bullseyes with bacon on weekend mornings.
- 8A convex glass lens placed in front of a lamp to concentrate its light and make it easier to notice as a signal; also, a lantern fitted with the lens.
From the deck they could see the flash of a bullseye signaling from the harbor wall.
The old police bullseye in the museum case still has its thick, curved lens.
Note
The lantern meaning runs through nineteenth-century night scenes. In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), a policeman's bull's-eye flashes in a window as his heavy tread passes outside, and Marcus Clarke writes of its gleam in For the Term of his Natural Life (1874). Both spell it bull's-eye, with the apostrophe of bull's still in place, so expect that form when the lamp turns up in older fiction.
- 9In military use, a reference point known to everyone involved, from which the location or direction of something is given.
Before the exercise, the squadron chose a bend in the river as its bullseye.
The controller gave each contact's position as a direction and distance from the bullseye.
Note
Everyone in an operation agrees on the point in advance, so that positions can be described the same way. Instead of saying where something lies from their own moving location, speakers give its direction and distance from the bullseye, and every listener can plot it from one shared spot.
- 10A circular window or opening in a wall or dome.
At noon, sunlight falls through the bullseye at the top of the dome and lands on the marble floor.
The architect set a stone-framed bullseye in the gable to light the attic.
Similaroculus
Note
Architects more often write oculus; bullseye is the plainer English name for the same round opening, whether it sits at the crown of a dome or lights an attic gable. The meaning is the same either way, so the choice is about register: oculus for technical description, bullseye for everyday talk about a building.
- 11The central part of a disk of crown glass, marked by a pattern of concentric ripples.
The glazier cut clear panes from the edge of the crown glass and saved the rippled bullseye for a back window.
Seen through the bullseye in the tavern's front window, people on the street look bent and wobbly.
- 12The mark left on a piece of blown glass where it was attached to a punty, the rod used to hold the piece while it is shaped.
Turn the vase over and you'll see the bullseye where the punty was snapped off.
The glassblower ground the bullseye flat so the bowl would sit level on the table.
Note
Glassblowers leave this scar where the finished piece is broken free of the punty, usually at the center of the base. A maker may leave it rough or grind and polish it smooth, so its finish hints at the care taken over a piece. In the workshop it also goes by bullion.
- 13A banknote worth fifty pounds sterling.
The cabbie wouldn't take a bullseye, so I had to go and find a cashpoint.
He peeled two bullseyes off the roll and slid them across the bar.
Note
This is British money slang, at home in casual talk about cash but out of place in banking or formal writing, where the same thing is simply a fifty-pound note. It takes an ordinary plural, so two bullseyes make a hundred pounds.
- 14A hand-canceled postmark that a counter clerk applies at a post office, typically on a receipt as proof of mailing.
Ask the counter clerk for a bullseye on your receipt so you can prove the tax return went out on time.
The clerk pressed a bullseye onto the certified-mail receipt, showing the date and the post office.
- 15Any of Brazil's first postage stamps, produced from 1843 onward.
Collectors of Brazilian stamps prize a bullseye with wide margins and a clear cancel.
The auction's star lot was a pair of bullseyes still on their original cover.
Note
Collectors took the name from the stamps' look: the shape of the key plate, or vignette, recalls the center of a target. It is informal shorthand for talk among philatelists, while a formal description identifies the issue by country and year.
- 16A piece of thick glass fitted into the side of a ship to let in light.
Gray morning light came through the bullseye in the hull and fell across the cramped berth.
The shipwright cut an opening in the hull planking and fitted a thick bullseye into it.
Similarporthole
Note
A sailor's term that has dropped out of use: the thick glass in a ship's side is now called a porthole, and that is the word to use in ordinary writing. Bullseye in this meaning belongs to accounts of older ships, where it names the same fitting by its period name.
- 17A crown coin, or the sum of five shillings that it was worth.
Note
The slang dates from the days of shillings and crowns and has long been out of use. Like its shorter partner bull, it could name either the coin or the sum, so a bullseye might be paid with one crown or with five separate shillings. Do not confuse it with today's fifty-pound note.
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Origin
From bull's + eye. It may come from the practice of English archers shooting an arrow through the eye socket of a bull's skull as a test of skill. The stamp-collecting sense comes from the shape of the key plate or vignette.