bespectacled

UK/bɪˈspɛktəkəld/US/bɪˈspɛktəkəld/

adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — spectacle sits at #5,233neutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Bespectacled means wearing glasses. A single word for a whole visual impression.

It is formal, slightly literary and faintly comic, and it appears almost entirely in written description of people, so a small bespectacled man is a whole character sketch in three words. Nobody says it in speech. The be- prefix is an old device for making adjectives out of nouns, and English keeps a handful of others including bewigged and bejewelled, all of them equally arch.

Definitions of bespectacled

1adjectivebespectacledWearing spectacles.C2
“A bespectacled clerk showed them into the office.”

Where it comes from

Proto-Indo-European
*speḱ-
Latin
spectāculum — a show, spectacle
Middle French
spectacle
Middle English
spectacle
English
spectacle
English, today
bespectacled

Built from

spectō · Latin — to see, behold
speciō · Latin — to see

From be + spectacle + ed. spectacle comes from Middle English spectacle, from Middle French spectacle, from Latin spectāculum (“a show, spectacle”), from spectō (“to see, behold”), frequentative of speciō (“to see”). See species. a doublet of spectaculum.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 20 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

bespectacled in the wild

Gordon is depicted as a bespectacled white man from Seattle, with brown hair and a signature circle beard, who graduated from MIT with a PhD in theoretical physics.
Gordon Freeman
The game features a bespectacled character known as "Bill" (a spoof of Bill Gates).
XBill
The bespectacled Barlow was both a popular and easily recognisable figure in South African cricket from the 1960s onwards.
Eddie Barlow
Mansell was a bespectacled middle-order batsman, slips fieldsman, and leg-break and googly bowler who sometimes bowled medium-pace.
Percy Mansell
Southcombe was a bespectacled ruckman who played 13 games for Carlton in 1977 before returning to the bush.
Tony Southcombe

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the spectō family

expect

bespectacled — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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