Definition: (1) Pertaining to or seen by the eye or eyes; (2) visual, related to vision.

Usage: Today's word sports a few interesting relatives. If you tire of using "glasses" and "spectacles," you can ask your friends how they like your new ocularies. 'Tis a rare word but legitimate. If your ophthalmologist fails you, you may want to turn to an ocularist, a maker of glass eyeballs. The adverb is very ordinary: "ocularly."

Suggested Usage: In his suspicions of Desdemona's faithfulness, Othello tells Iago "Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof," in Shakespeare's play 'Othello.' Anything visible or visual falls under the scope of today's word: "Blanche White was a fuss of ocular excitement in her new designer dress." An interesting side note: the Greeks made the columns on their buildings slightly convex to defeat the ocular illusion that straight columns are slightly concave, a practice called entasis.

Etymology: Today's word was borrowed via French from Late Latin ocularis "related to the eye" from Latin oculus "eye, bud." The same root is found in "monocle" and "binoculars" from bi- "two" + "ocularis." The original meaning of "inoculate" was "to graft a scion," to 'in-bud' a plant, using the root ocul- in its second sense. The root was originally *okw-. Old English inherited this root at "eage" which softened even more to "eye." It didn't soften before the suffix –l, so we also find "ogle." In Greek the final [kw] converted to [p] so we get opthalmos "eye" as in "ophthalmology" and "optical," as well as "triceratops" from tri "three" + cerat- "horn" + ops "eye."