thousand-yard stare

English

Alternative forms

• thousand yard stare

Etymology

Such terms are usually said to have originated in the usage of soldiers and the physicians who treated them for combat wounds and combat stress. A search of a large corpus finds thousand-yard stare attested during World War II (citations from 1943 to 1945), naming a symptom of social isolation in far-flung posts or of combat stress; the absence of attestations of *-yard stare and *-year stare from before 1943 suggests that perhaps this symptom (from any mentally traumatic cause) was not called by these names until the 1940s. In contrast, the thematically related term shell shock was in use during World War I.

Noun

thousand-yard stare (plural thousand-yard stares)

1. (informal, military) A blank, unfocused glance given by a traumatized person, especially a soldier who has seen combat.

   Synonyms: thousand-mile stare, hundred-yard stare

See also

• dead-eyed
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• PTSD
• see the elephant
• shell shock

Further reading

• thousand-yard stare on Wikipedia.Wikipedia