Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
💧 A liquid tool 🎨 A color picker
eye dropper

eye dropper

3.8
A tool in a program that picks a color from an image for use elsewhere
  • noun
  • Specialized
translation icon : cuentagotas
  • When recording the tutorial, she showed how the eye dropper reads hexadecimal color codes.

Examples

  • The designer used the eye dropper to match the button color across different files.

  • I used an eye dropper to select the perfect shade of blue.

  • In Photoshop, use the eye dropper to pick the exact color from the image.

  • The graphic designer prefers to use an eye dropper for color matching.

  • The designer used the eye dropper tool to select the exact shade of blue for the website's background.

  • In the graphics program, the eye dropper allows users to pick colors directly from the image they are editing.

  • To match the paint for the mural, he used the eye dropper to sample the colors displayed on his computer screen.

Synonyms

eyedropper
vseye dropper
  • Jargon
1 3.7

A tool in design programs that picks a color from an image

is the same tool but written as two separate words

Surface Forms

eye dropper singular
eye droppers plural

Morphology

eye + dropper

The compound is a metaphorical extension of a physical 'eye' + 'dropper' (a small pipette for the eye) to a tool that 'samples' a tiny element; knowing the constituents suggests a small instrument but does not directly indicate 'color picking' in software. In a software context the sampling sense can be inferred (it 'picks' a tiny sample), so the relation is partial and context-dependent rather than fully compositional.

Etymology

Eye dropper in image programs gets its name from the little medicine tool. It 'picks up' a tiny sample of 'color' from the screen like the bulb of a real dropper that draws a drop, so the name shows it copies small bits of color to use elsewhere.