more than meets the eye
- idiom
- Informal
:
más de lo que parece
- There is more than meets the eye to that old building; it has a fascinating history.
Examples
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Her explanation sounded sincere, but I felt there was more than meets the eye.
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Is there more than meets the eye in this painting?
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At first, the puzzle seems easy, but there's more than meets the eye.
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There's more than meets the eye!
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At first, the puzzle seems easy, but there's more than meets the eye.
-
There is more than meets the eye to that old building; it has a fascinating history.
-
Her explanation sounded sincere, but I felt there was more than meets the eye.
Antonyms
How Complex
Surface Forms
Morphology
more + than + meet + the + eye
The comparative 'more than' clearly signals a greater degree, and 'meets the eye' uses a metaphor of being perceived, so a learner can partly infer that something exceeds its apparent surface. However, the figurative use of 'meets the eye' (a non-literal sense of 'meet' + 'eye') is not fully predictable at B1 without exposure, making the overall phrase only partially compositional.
Etymology
More than meets the eye paints a simple picture: what your eye first sees is only the outside of something, like a plain box that hides many things inside. So it means 'something is more complex or interesting than it looks at first'.