- 1nB2
/ˌpraɪvət ˈaɪ/
A detective who does not work for the police, and who is paid by an ordinary person or a company to watch someone, ask questions and find things out.
私家偵探
複數 private eyes
核心畫面
A pair of eyes you can hire. Not the police, not the government: someone an ordinary person or a company pays to watch, wait, ask around and bring back what they find. Private says who they answer to, and eye says what the job is made of. The phrase is informal, and it arrives carrying the whole feeling of detective films and paperback novels with it.
可以想成一雙「租得到的眼睛」。不是警察，也不是政府的人，而是一般人或公司出錢請來幫你盯、幫你等、幫你打聽，再把查到的…更多收起
可以想成一雙「租得到的眼睛」。不是警察，也不是政府的人，而是一般人或公司出錢請來幫你盯、幫你等、幫你打聽，再把查到的東西帶回來的人。private 說的是他對誰負責，eye 說的是這份工作在做什麼。這個說法偏口語，而且一出口就帶著偵探電影和平裝小說的整個氣味。From the word’s history
Wiktionary traces the phrase to private investigator and its short form PI: the letter I sounds the same as eye, and eye also suggests watching someone. Both halves feed the modern picture of a hired watcher.
維基詞典說這個詞來自 private investigator 和它的縮寫 PI：字母 I 的唸法跟 eye 一樣，而 eye 又讓人想到「盯著看」。兩邊剛好合起來，變成今天「被雇來盯人的那雙眼睛」這個畫面。
Wiktionary entry for private eye, packet source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1329052230
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
private eyenoun
- 1
A private personal detective, employed to gather information about someone.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。