cross-eyed

The street lights were fuzzy from the fine rain that was falling. As I made my way home, I felt very old, but when I looked at the tip of my nose I could see fine misty beads, but looking cross-eyed made me dizzy so I quit.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960.

cross-eyed adjective
having one or both eyes looking inwards towards the nose:
I’m going cross-eyed, working on those hand-written texts all day. [OALD]

She was a somewhat odd-looking young woman. Her wide-spaced eyes were glassy, almost milky, and a bit off-kilter. She was almost, but not quite, cross-eyed. She was a bit darker-skinned than Lando, and her black hair was done up in a complicated sort of braid piled on top of her head.

Roger MacBride Allen, Star Wars : Ambush at Corellia, 1995.

On the other hand, Fermina Daza, his wife, who at that time was seventy-two years old and had already lost the doe’s gait of her younger days, was an irrational idolater of tropical flowers and domestic animals, and early in her marriage she had taken advantage of the novelty of love to keep many more of them in the house than good sense would allow. The first were three Dalmatians named after Roman emperors, who fought for the favors of a female who did honor to her name of Messalina, for it took her longer to give birth to nine pups than to conceive another ten. Then there were Abyssinian cats with the profiles of eagles and the manners of pharaohs, cross-eyed Siamese and palace Persians with orange eyes, who walked through the rooms like shadowy phantoms and shattered the night with the howling of their witches’ sabbaths of love.

Grabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, 1988.

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