stye

Other forms: styes

If you've ever gotten a swollen infection in your eyelid, you know just how unpleasant a stye can be. Styes are red and painful, and they're caused by touching your eye with dirty hands.

You can spell this word stye or sty, but don't confuse it with the kind of sty a pig lives in. Your doctor might refer to a stye as a hordeolum, but what ever you call it, it's a common bacterial infection that usually goes away on its own. Stye comes from the Middle English styany, or "stye on eye," from a root that means "to go up or rise."

Definitions of stye

1. noun

   an infection of the sebaceous gland of the eyelid
   synonyms: eye infection, hordeolum, sty

   type of:

   infection

   the pathological state resulting from the invasion of the body by pathogenic microorganisms