🚗 A turn signal 🐴 Horse eye covers 🐴 To cover eyes

blinker

2 7.0

A leather flap on a horse's bridle that stops it from seeing to the side

noun
/ˈblɪŋkər/

: anteojera

Putting blinkers on the horse allowed it to ignore the crowd and concentrate on running.
puts on blinkers

You live with blinkers, you live with eight people.

Examples

Dobbin would be half asleep behind his blinkers, mumbling some sugar cubes.

Fiction book (1998)
If she puts on blinkers, that would be a plus, because then we'd know if she's being asked for speed out of the gate.

Fiction book (1990)
You know, put the horse blinkers on.

It's All Gone Pete Tong (2004)
Even the horses are wearing blinkers.

The Seven Year Itch (1955)
You think you're pretty fancy with the blinkers on the horses.

The Seven Year Itch (1955)
The trainer decided to use blinkers on the racehorse to help it focus on the track ahead.
To ensure the horse doesn't get distracted during the ride, the jockey fitted it with blinkers.

Synonyms

blinder

vsblinker

3 8.4

A piece of leather on a horse's harness that keeps it from seeing to the side

is fixed to the bridle as a single front flap rather than harness attachments

winker

vsblinker

Specialized

9.9

A piece of leather or plastic put beside a horse's eye to stop it seeing to the side

is a single leather flap attached to the bridle that limits side vision

Surface Forms

blinker singular

blinkers plural

Morphology

blinker = blink (semi-transparent) = blink + er

The word is clearly formed with blink + -er, but the specialized horse-tack sense is not fully predictable from the base verb alone.

Etymology

Blinker for a horse comes from the common verb blink, which means 'to close your eyes quickly', with the small ending '-er' to make it a thing. Think of a leather flap by the eye that blocks side view so the horse keeps looking forward, which is why a blinker stops distractions.