turn a blind eye

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

to deliberately ignore or choose not to notice something, especially wrongdoing or an inconvenient fact, pretending not to see it; the phrase is traditionally attributed to Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, where, when ordered by his superior Admiral Sir Hyde Parker to disengage from the battle by signal flag, Nelson raised his telescope to his blind eye — he had lost the sight of his right eye in an earlier battle — and declared he could not see the signal, continuing his attack and winning the battle; whether the anecdote is literally true is debated by historians, but it became the defining origin story of the idiom and made Nelson's gesture synonymous with wilful unawareness; to turn a blind eye implies a conscious and deliberate choice not to see, distinguished from mere ignorance or oversight — it is typically used in contexts of complicity, negligence, or the avoidance of uncomfortable knowledge