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optical

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɒptɪkəl//
  • United States//ˈɑptɪkəl//

Of or relating to sight; visual.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or relating to sight; visual.

    Strabismus is an optical defect.

  2. 2

    Designed to assist or enhance sight

    A microscope is an optical instrument.

  3. 3

    Of or relating to optics.

    Refraction is an optical effect.

  4. 4

    Of or relating to visible light.

    Optical telescopes don't work when it is cloudy.

  5. 5

    Incorporating light-sensitive devices.

    An optical switch opens the door automatically.

Etymology

From optic + -al.

noun

  1. 1

    Any special effect requiring laboratory work on the film.

    It is a glossy film with gross, opulent opticals and little comic, or any, relief; it has the jaundiced complexion of an early 60s underground film, which it is; it is ponderous, Wagnerian, and feels about five hours long (its running time is about an hour).

    If you plan to output back to film, opticals and effects can be shot on film or generated by computer and then transferred to film.

Forms

plural
opticals
comparative
more optical
superlative
most optical
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).