Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A light-sensitive organelle of certain chiefly unicellular organisms, such as euglenas and some motile algae.
  • noun A simple visual organ of certain invertebrates, consisting of a cluster of photoreceptor cells and pigment cells.
  • noun A rounded eyelike marking, as on the wings of certain butterflies.
  • noun Any of several fungal diseases that affect grasses and are characterized by oval lesions.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun biology Any of various primitive light-sensitive organs or regions in many diverse organisms.
  • noun An eye-like marking on the tail of a peacock or the wing of a butterfly.
  • noun botany Any of a group of fungal infections of grasses that are characterized by oval spots.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From eye +‎ spot.

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Examples

  • And here were pairs of brown butterflies called, I believe, the small heath, with a distinctive eyespot on the wing, observed when they came to rest, wings always closed.

    Country diary: Wasdale, Lake District 2011

  • And here were pairs of brown butterflies called, I believe, the small heath, with a distinctive eyespot on the wing, observed when they came to rest, wings always closed.

    Country diary: Wasdale, Lake District 2011

  • Carrying this thought further, how could Lamarckism create a complicated organ like the eye, or even a simple eyespot?

    Happy Lamarck Day - The Panda's Thumb 2010

  • Down La Canebière I stroll, heading for the glinting, faraway turquoise eyespot of the Old Port, following women dressed in ankle-length raincoats and Islamic head scarves, long-faced men in frayed djellabas and knit skullcaps, gangly youths with scruffy beards.

    Sunstroked 2008

  • Down La Canebière I stroll, heading for the glinting, faraway turquoise eyespot of the Old Port, following women dressed in ankle-length raincoats and Islamic head scarves, long-faced men in frayed djellabas and knit skullcaps, gangly youths with scruffy beards.

    Sunstroked 2008

  • No stigmata, no eyespot for her infamy, no language yet for lies when Lester and Josephine Jukes come to take her away.

    SWITCHBACKS Joan Stepp Smith 2010

  • With the session out of time the last namecheck of the DIY media phenomenon went to eyespot, an online video remixing community.

    January « 2007 « Innovation Cloud 2007

  • Organism with no eyespot experiences a random mutation due to natural forces, which produces some minutely incremental change which happens to move the organism towards an eyespot, and which is somehow promotable by natural selection.

    Kicking the Legs Out From Under the Willfully Ignorant « Whatever 2007

  • How did we go from no eyespot to an eyespot while following the rules we know?

    Kicking the Legs Out From Under the Willfully Ignorant « Whatever 2007

  • And since there are so many different kinds of eyes, there might well be multiple modes of development, many different kinds of eyespots, rather than a single eyespot ancestor that led to human eyes and squid eyes and fish eyes and so on.

    Kicking the Legs Out From Under the Willfully Ignorant « Whatever 2007

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