Other forms: ogles, ogling, ogled
To ogle is to stare at somebody in an unwelcome admiring way. Ogle the passers-by, being ogled, ogled openly.
The openness is what makes it offensive rather than merely appreciative — an ogle is a stare that does not care about being seen. It is old-fashioned in tone, which softens it in a way the behaviour does not deserve. Note that the word probably came from Low German, from a verb about eyes.
1verbogleTo stare at somebody in an unwelcome admiring way.
“The builders ogled every woman who walked past the site.”
ogle is a way of staring.
Probably from Low German ogeln, to make eyes at, from a root meaning eye. Eye and ocular come from related roots.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃ekʷ-
Middle Low German
ö̂gelen
Low German
ögeln — to ogle, to flirt with one's eyes
English, today
ogle
17th century. Probably from Low German ögeln (“to ogle, to flirt with one's eyes”), from Middle Low German ö̂gelen, frequentative of Middle Low German ö̂gen, from Old Saxon ōgian, from Proto-West Germanic augijan (“to show”). Alternatively from an equivalent Dutch ogelen, but this seems unattested (only the simplex ogen). by surface analysis, en + eye + le.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Ways of Looking