eyebrow

Pluraleyebrows

Formseyebrows, eyebrowing, eyebrowed

1. 1
   nouncountable

   The strip of hair that grows along the bony ridge above each eye socket.

   A scar split her left eyebrow in two.

   He darkened his eyebrows with a pencil before the shoot.

   Similarbrow

   Note

   Old English built the word from eye and brow, ēaganbrū, and the meaning has stayed put ever since. A near-twin, ēagbrǣw, meant "eyelid" instead. Dutch oogbrauw still stretches across eyelid, eyelash and eyebrow, while German Augenbraue, like English, settled on the brow alone. The names for the parts around the eye once overlapped loosely, and English fixed this one on the hair above it.

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To convey a message or signal to someone by moving the eyebrows.

   He can eyebrow a question across a crowded room without saying a word.

   She eyebrowed her sister a quiet warning during dinner.

   Note

   Here the brows do the talking, and the verb takes the message as its object. Kathy Reichs, in Bones Never Lie (2015), has a character "eyebrowing a question at" another. The person addressed usually follows at, as with a glance or a nod, while the thing signaled, such as a question or a warning, is what gets eyebrowed. A double object works too: she eyebrowed her sister a warning.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A usually small dormer whose roofline forms an arched curve over its face, then reverses into a wave to meet the horizontal line at each end.

   The architect tucked an eyebrow into the front slope to bring daylight into the loft.

   Restoring the Victorian house's eyebrows required steam-bending each rafter by hand.

   Note

   A roof framer's dormer with no vertical side walls. The sheathing is bent into a shallow wave that rises over the window and then dies smoothly back into the main roof plane at both ends. It reads as a lift in the roof surface rather than a box set on top of it, and its low arch echoes the brow over an eye.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A clump of waste fibers that builds up on the rollers of a textile machine.

   She paused the carding line to pick an eyebrow off the top roller.

   Frequent eyebrows on the rollers signaled that the fiber was running too short.

5. 5
   verbintransitive

   Of waste fiber, to gather and build up into a clump on a roller within a machine.

   Short-staple cotton will eyebrow on the doffer if the speed is set wrong.

   The line eyebrowed badly overnight, clogging the top roller.

   Note

   A mill verb that takes no object: the fiber or the line simply eyebrows. Short cotton eyebrows on the doffer, and a line eyebrows overnight. The result is the matted clump of waste, a ridge that builds up around a roller in carding or spinning and must be cleared before it disrupts the running web. Nobody eyebrows a roller; the fiber does it to itself.

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