Where Does the Expression ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’ Come From?

Though it appears to be a straightforward command to “keep your eyes open,” the lexical evidence for where the expression keep your eyes peeled came from is varied and intriguing—and there are some eye-popping theories.

The Meaning—Early Uses—of Keep Your Eyes Peeled

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the idiom keep your eyes peeled means “to remain alert, be on the lookout; to watch carefully.” It began turning up in print in the mid-1800s, with the first known use dating to an 1844 issue of Atlas magazine: “The Whigs of Hampden must keep their eyes ‘peeled’, or they’ll lose that banner.”

As the years have gone by, the expression has been used to dole out courtship advice—an 1852 example from the Defiance Democrat urges male suitors to “Keep your eye peeled when you are after the women”—and to describe someone searching, as in this 1901 use from Munsey’s Magazine: “I kept my eyes peeled, but I didn’t see her in the afternoon crowd.” The phrase is still popular today; in his 2022 book 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter, for example, author Patrick Aryee urges readers looking through a microscope for tardigrades to “keep [their] eyes peeled for something that looks like a miniature vacuum bag with legs stuck to it.”

A less familiar version of the expression omits keep. Examples of the phrase peel your eyes have been popping up since the late 1800s, with the OED including a use as recently as 2001. Author Tim Heald’s used this variant in his 1976 book Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: “I’ve been peeling my eyes ... There are some funny goings-on going on.”

The Origins of Keep Your Eyes Peeled

There are some interesting theories about the origin of this idiom. One, from Julia Cresswell’s Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, is quite literal: “Keep your eyes peeled comes from the idea of ‘peeling’ the covering from your eyes to see as clearly as possible.”

Others theorize that the expression is related to pirates roaming the seas and keeping their eyes open for potential victims—and whether or not it actually did originate on ships and the seas, the phrase was soon being used in stories about them: Just four years after the OED’s first citation of the term, a story called “The Cruise of the Gentile,” reprinted from Graham’s Magazine in the Ohio newspaper The Sandusky Clarion, has one sailor on a ship telling another during a shift change, “keep your eye peeled, look-out; and mind, no caulking.”

Yet another theory links keep your eyes peeled with the British police. Per theidioms.com, “Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel founded the first professional police force, the Metropolitan Police Force, in London in 1829. The police officers quickly adopted the nicknames ‘Peelers’ and ‘Bobbies’ due to the unpopular fact that they answered directly to Peel at the Home Office.” According to this theory, we may have gotten keep your eyes peeled because those 19th-century Peelers had to keep their eyes peeled for crime and other chicanery.

Unfortunately, as with so many phrase origins, these theories may be too good to be true—and that’s because it’s possible that keep your eyes peeled is a variation of an older and less popular (but more evocatively bizarre) phrase: keep your eyes skinned, an expression the OED traces to a U.S. Senate document from 1828 quoting the diary of A. Wetmore. “ ‘Keep your eyes skinned now,’ said the old trapper. We are now entering upon the most dangerous section of the trace,” it reads. Herman Melville has Captain Ahab use a similar phrasing in 1851’s Moby-Dick: “A white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.” Peeled, of course, is a synonym of skinned, which would knock at least the Peelers theory out of contention.

We might not be able to trace this idiom back to its ultimate origins, but one thing is clear: Whether your eyes are peeled or skinned, you’re taking a really solid looksee.

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