Skip to content
OneKitly

blink

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈblɪŋk//
  • /[ˈblɪŋk]/

To close and reopen both eyes quickly.

verb

  1. 1

    To close and reopen both eyes quickly.

    The loser in the staring game is the person who blinks first.

  2. 2

    To close and reopen both eyes quickly. To close and reopen one's eyes to remove (something) from on or around the eyes.

    She blinked her tears away.

  3. 3

    To close and reopen both eyes quickly. To wink; to twinkle with, or as with, the eye.

    One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame.

  4. 4

    To close and reopen both eyes quickly. To see with the eyes half shut, or indistinctly and with frequent winking, as a person with weak eyes.

    Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne.

  5. 5

    To close and reopen both eyes quickly. To shine, especially with intermittent light; to twinkle; to flicker; to glimmer, as a lamp.

    The dew was falling fast, the stars began to blink.

    The sun blinked fair on pool and stream.

  6. 6

    obsoleteTo close and reopen both eyes quickly. To glance.

    Now exile is over, I'll fly to the north, The home of my childhood, the place of my birth; O the transports of gladness that over me reign, To blink upon canny Newcastle again!

  7. 7

    To flash on and off at regular intervals.

    The blinking text on the screen was distracting.

  8. 8

    To flash on and off at regular intervals. To flash headlights on a car at.

    An urban legend claims that gang members will attack anyone who blinks them.

  9. 9

    To flash on and off at regular intervals. To send a signal with a lighting device.

    Don't come to the door until I blink twice.

  10. 10

    To perform the smallest action that could solicit a response.

    All the waiters in your grand cafe / Leave their tables when you blink.

  11. 11

    To have the slightest doubt, hesitation or remorse.

    The soldier shot the intruders without so much as blinking.

  12. 12

    To shut the eyes to (something); to evade, ignore.

    I have no wish to blink or extenuate the serious nature of the difficulty arising from this discrepancy of dates.

    It is no use blinking the unpleasant fact.

    "Well, it's no good blinking facts. We had better clear out soon. If not tomorrow, then the day after."

  13. 13

    To deceive; to hoodwink.

    "But I beg of you never more to commit her to my keeping, for I would sooner take charge of, and be accountable for, all the swine in Saxony than for one such woman, so many were the artifices and plots she devised to blink me."

  14. 14

    To turn slightly sour, or blinky, as beer, milk, etc.

  15. 15

    To teleport, mostly for short distances.

Etymology

From Middle English blynken, blenken, from Old English *blincan (suggested by causative verb blenċan (“to deceive”); > English blench), from Proto-Germanic *blinkaną, a variant of *blīkaną (“to gleam, shine”). Cognate with Dutch blinken (“to glitter, shine”), German blinken (“to flash, blink”), Danish blinke (“to flash, twinkle, wink, blink”), Swedish blinka (“to flash, blink, twinkle, wink, blink”). Related to blank, blick, blike, bleak.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of quickly closing both eyes and opening them again.

  2. 2

    figurativeThe time needed to close and reopen one's eyes.

  3. 3

    A text formatting feature that causes text to disappear and reappear as a form of visual emphasis.

    I can think of no good reason to use blink because blinking text and images are annoying, they mark the creator as an amateur, and they have poor browser support.

  4. 4

    A glimpse or glance.

    This is the first blink that ever I had of him.

  5. 5

    gleam; glimmer; sparkle

    Not a blink of light was there.

    this man vanished away […]as he had been a blink of the sun

  6. 6

    The dazzling whiteness about the horizon caused by the reflection of light from fields of ice at sea; iceblink

  7. 7

    Boughs cast where deer are to pass, in order to turn or check them.

  8. 8

    An ability that allows teleporting, mostly for short distances

Forms

plural
blinks
past tense
blinked
past participle
blinked
present participle
blinking
third person singular
blinks
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).