Crossword clues for saccade
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Saccade \Sac*cade"\, n. [F.] (Man.) A sudden, violent check of a horse by drawing or twitching the reins on a sudden and with one pull.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1705, from French saccade "a jerk," from obsolete saquer "to shake, pull," dialectal variant of Old French sachier, ultimately from Latin saccus "sack" (see sack (n.1)). Related: Saccadic.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context rare English) A sudden jerking movement. 2 A rapid jerky movement of the eye (voluntary or involuntary) from one focus to another. 3 The act of checking a horse quickly with a single strong pull of the reins. 4 (context music English) The sounding of two violin strings together by using a sudden strong pressure of the bow. vb. (context of the eye English) To make a rapid jerking movement to focus elsewhere.
Wikipedia
A saccade ( , French for jerk) is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. The phenomenon can be associated with a shift in frequency of an emitted signal or a movement of a body part or device. Controlled cortically by the frontal eye fields (FEF), or subcortically by the superior colliculus, saccades serve as a mechanism for fixation, rapid eye movement, and the fast phase of optokinetic nystagmus. The word appears to have been coined in the 1880s by French ophthalmologist Émile Javal, who used a mirror on one side of a page to observe eye movement in silent reading, and found that it involves a succession of discontinuous individual movements.
Usage examples of "saccade".
Il ne repondit pas, et il se mit a marcher en long, en large, a pas saccades, la tete haute, les yeux brillants, les levres fremissantes.
He opened the message, and his eyes flew all over it in mad saccades, trying to absorb it as a gestalt.
He allowed his eyes to track back from that distant point, jumping tens of kilometres with a succession of ballistic saccades: Empty.
She gazed intently at the smooth face in front of her, hundreds of minute saccades flicking her eyes from tiny muscular movements of the muscles around the thin mouth, to the steady depth of the small, black eyes, to the small hollowing, ballooning of the yellow, hairless cheeks.