lens
Plurallenses
Plurallenses
- 1A usually glass object that focuses or spreads out the light that passes through it.
The photographer swapped in a wide-angle lens for the landscape shot.
Each lens in the telescope bends light to bring distant stars into focus.
Note
Named for a seed: Latin lēns meant "lentil", and a double-convex lens has a lentil's profile, while Arabic ʕadsa, meaning "lentil" and "optic lens" at once, lent Medieval Latin the optical meaning. The plural is lenses; lens and lentes survive only as obsolete or rare forms. Strong magnification comes at a price, as Catherine Clabby noted in American Scientist (2013): the best magnifying lenses give a narrow depth of field.
- 2The transparent crystalline structure inside the eye that focuses light onto the retina.
Surgeons removed the clouded lens and replaced it with an artificial implant.
Tiny muscles reshape the lens so the eye can focus on nearby objects.
Note
Anatomy borrowed the glass-maker's word for the eye's own focusing body. Fenella Saunders describes the mammalian eye as a single-imaging optic: one lens that takes in light from a wide range of angles, gaining both sensitivity and resolution. In specialist writing "the lens" is enough. In general prose, "the lens of the eye" keeps it apart from glasses and cameras.
- 3A particular way of looking at or interpreting something, whether literally or figuratively.
Historians often view past events through the lens of their own era's values.
Viewed through an economic lens, the policy looks very different.
Similarprism, perspective, filter, viewpoint
Note
Usually met in the phrase through a … lens, with an adjective or an of-phrase naming the viewpoint: through a negative lens, through the lens of history. Steven Spielberg stretches the metaphor further, speaking of lenses people are forced to peer through. The verbs that go with it are look, view and see, and the lens belongs to the viewer, not to the thing viewed.
- 4A device that focuses or spreads out beams of electrons, much as a glass lens does with light.
An electromagnetic lens bends the electron beam toward a fine focal point.
Engineers aligned each lens to sharpen the image in the electron microscope.
- 5A body of rock, ice, or water shaped like a convex lens, thicker at the center than at the edges.
Geologists mapped a lens of gravel pinching out against the bedrock.
Beneath the island, a lens of fresh groundwater sits above denser seawater.
Note
Earth scientists borrow the shape rather than the optics: a deposit or pocket that is thick in the middle and thins to nothing at its rim. It usually takes an of-phrase naming the material, as in a lens of sand, a lens of ice or a lens of fresh water. The adjective for the shape is lenticular, and the verb for thinning out describes how such a body ends.
- 6To film or shoot something with a camera.
The director chose to lens the chase scene at dawn.
A veteran cinematographer lensed the film's hardest scenes.
Similarfilm, shoot, photograph
Note
Film writing uses this verb for shooting. It is transitive and often passive: a picture is lensed by its cinematographer, or lensed in a particular look. Katie Rife describes a suburb lensed in generic gunmetal gray. Its forms lenses and lensed coincide with the plural noun and with the geology verb. The object, a film or a scene, keeps the meaning clear.
- 7A convex shape bounded by two circular arcs that meet at their endpoints; the matching concave shape is called a lune.
The overlap of the two disks forms a lens with two curved sides.
She calculated the area of the lens formed by two intersecting circles.
Oppositelune
Note
Geometry names this shape after a glass lens seen edge-on: two circular arcs bulging outward and meeting at sharp points. Its partner term is lune, the concave counterpart. Two overlapping circles produce both: a lens where they share area, and a lune where one circle reaches beyond the other.
- 8A construct in statically typed functional programming languages used to access and update nested data structures.
She wrote a lens to update a single field in a deeply nested record.
Composing one lens with another lets you reach values several layers down.
Note
A programmer's borrowing, chosen because the construct focuses on one part of a larger structure. It pairs a way of reading a nested field with a way of updating it, without altering the original data. Lenses are built to compose: joining two lenses gives a lens that reaches one layer deeper. That is why the word usually appears alongside verbs like compose, focus and update.
- 9A genus of the legume family, or the small lens-shaped bean it produces.
The cultivated lens has fed people across the Middle East for thousands of years.
Botanists place the lens among the legumes, alongside peas and beans.
Similarlentil
Note
Here the word goes back to its Latin meaning: lēns was the lentil, and botany keeps it as the name of the genus. As a genus name in scientific writing it is capitalized and italicized, Lens. In everyday English the bean itself is a lentil. Its flat, bulging seed is the shape behind the optical lens and every lens-shaped sense after it.
- 10To gradually become thinner toward the edges.
Geologists noted how the sandstone beds lens toward the basin margin.
The volcanic ash deposits lens out and vanish a few miles east.
Oppositethicken
Note
The geologist's verb for what a lens-shaped body does at its margins. It takes no object, and it often pairs with out: beds lens out toward the basin, and ash deposits lens out and vanish. It describes how a layer ends, gradually rather than abruptly. That makes it the natural verb for the lens-shaped deposit.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of lens apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Borrowed from Latin lēns ("lentil"), with Medieval Latin later taking on the sense of "lens": a semantic loan from Arabic عَدْسَة (ʕadsa, "lentil; optic lens").