eyelash

The word lash had a violent early life. It entered Middle English around the fourteenth century, most likely from Middle Dutch or Low German lassche, meaning a thong or flexible cord, and its earliest English senses were for the crack of a whip or a blow delivered by a cord. To lash someone was to strike them; the lash was the instrument. The word carried the sharpness of a snap.

By the sixteenth century, English speakers had extended lash to the flexible tip of a whip, and from there it was a short jump to the fine hairs fringing the eyelid. The first recorded compound eyelash appears in English prose in 1629. Eye had been in the language since Old English eage, traceable back to Proto-Germanic augô and shared, in its deep root, with Latin oculus and Greek ops.

The compound is transparent in a way that most body-part names are not. English usually prefers opaque Latin or French terms for anatomy: cornea, pupil, iris. Eyelash stayed in native English stock, a compound of two common words that anyone could parse. That transparency did not make it less precise; it made it more immediate, closer to the physical thing it named.

Other languages solved the same problem differently. German settled on Wimper, from an older word for a quivering edge. French chose cil, from Latin cilium, meaning eyelid. Each language found its own figure for the thin fringe above the eye. English chose a whip stroke, and four centuries later, no one questions it.