To do something ‘in the blink of an eye’ is to do it almost instantaneously. The image is the obvious one: a single involuntary closing and opening of the eyelid, a movement so quick that most of us never notice ourselves doing it.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘in the blink of an eye’?
The modern phrase is a nineteenth-century rephrasing of a much older expression: ‘in the twinkling of an eye’. Both share the same source, and the same idea, but the older form reigned in English for more than five hundred years before ‘blink’ began to crowd it out.
The expression entered English from the Bible. In the first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul described the resurrection of the dead using a Greek phrase, en ripē ophthalmou, which carries the sense of a quick flicking or jerking of the eye. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate rendered this as in ictu oculi, ‘in a stroke of the eye’, and that Latin phrase circulated widely in medieval sermons and devotional writing.
The earliest English form appears in Robert Manning of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, a Middle English verse manual of confession completed in 1303, which uses the line ‘Yn twynkelyng of an ye’. John Wycliffe’s translation of the New Testament, finished in 1382, carried the same image into 1 Corinthians 15:52 with the spelling ‘in the twynklyng of an iye’. When the King James Bible appeared in 1611 the wording had settled into the form still familiar to most English speakers today:
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
The Old English root behind ‘twinkling’ was twinclian, meaning to wink or to shine with rapid intermittent light. For most of the phrase’s history the verbs ‘twinkle’, ‘wink’ and ‘blink’ carried overlapping senses, and English writers drew on all three.
‘Blink’ itself is the relative newcomer of the three. It entered English around the 1580s, probably from Middle Dutch blinken, ‘to glitter’, and originally carried a vague set of meanings to do with glancing and shining. The specific sense of a momentary involuntary closing of the eye is not securely attested until the middle of the nineteenth century. As that sense settled into everyday speech, writers began substituting ‘blink’ for the more archaic ‘twinkling’, and ‘in the blink of an eye’ gradually established itself as the more colloquial form. Both expressions are still in use, but the older ‘twinkling’ version now carries a faintly literary or biblical flavour, while ‘blink’ has become the everyday choice.