glasses

1. 1
   nounplural

   A frame holding two lenses worn in front of the eyes to correct or aid vision.

   The optometrist adjusted the frames so her new glasses sat comfortably on her nose.

   He kept losing his glasses until he started wearing them on a cord around his neck.

   Similarspectacles, eyeglasses, specs

   Note

   A plural with no singular in this meaning. You say your glasses are on the table, never your glass is, and one glass means a tumbler, not one lens. To count them, English borrows pair: a pair of glasses, two pairs of glasses. The pair takes a singular verb (a pair of glasses is missing), but glasses alone always takes a plural one.

   I need a new pair of glasses before the exam.

   My glasses are somewhere in the car.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of glass.

   The waiter arranged a dozen wine glasses on a silver tray.

   She rinsed the glasses and set them out on the counter to dry.

   Note

   Only the countable meanings take a plural: drinking vessels, what they hold (two glasses of wine), and mirrors. The -es follows the final hissing s, as in passes. The substance itself is normally uncountable, but in the broad sense of any amorphous solid it can be counted, so different glassy solids are glasses too. Keep this apart from the word for spectacles, which has no singular at all.

3. 3
   nounplural

   A pair of joined tubes fitted with lenses, held to the eyes for viewing distant objects; binoculars.

   The captain trained his glasses on the distant vessel slipping along the horizon.

   She lifted the glasses to her eyes and scanned the far ridge for any movement.

   Similarbinoculars

   Note

   Short for field glasses, and plural-only like the word for spectacles. Because the pair works as one instrument, speakers sometimes slip into the singular. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), a character holds his Zeiss glasses and then says "I focused it." Context usually decides between eyewear and binoculars. Someone trains or lifts glasses at a distant ridge, but wears them on the nose.

4. 4
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of glass.

   The conservator carefully glasses each framed print before it goes on the wall.

   From the ridge, the guide glasses the far slope for elk before letting the hunters move.

   Note

   One spelling covers very different actions. A glazier glasses a window, and an observer glasses a hillside through binoculars. In British colloquial use, someone who glasses another person has hit them with a drinking glass. The object decides which meaning is meant. The form also matches the noun plural. Her glasses are on the table and she glasses the frame differ only in role: the verb follows a singular subject and takes an object.

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