Question 1

What does “cut eye” mean?

Accepted Answer

A deliberate, hostile sidelong glance — contempt delivered by the eyes alone.

Question 2

Where does “cut eye” come from?

Accepted Answer

Cut-eye is a gesture and its name together, carried in Black communities of the United States and the Caribbean and traced by scholarship directly to West Africa. The anchor study is John R. Rickford and Angela E. Rickford's "Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise," published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1976 (vol. 89, no. 353, pp. 294–309). Surveying usage in the U.S., Guyana, Jamaica, and West African communities, the Rickfords showed that both the gesture and the compound name for it recur across the Black Atlantic — that African peoples brought not only words but a repertoire of meaningful gestures through slavery, and kept the names attached. The phrase has lived for generations in Black American speech, especially Southern, usually as the verb: to cut your eyes at somebody. It remains ordinary household language — the look a child gets warned about giving an elder. The scholarship matters because the gesture is so often read by outsiders as mere individual attitude; the Rickfords documented it as inherited, patterned, and named — a piece of African communicative culture in New World guise, exactly as their title says.