- 1nB2/ˌpraɪvət ˈaɪ/私家偵探
口語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.
示範例句 · Example
Her uncle works as a private eye and spends most of the day sitting in a parked car.
逐字她叔叔做私家偵探的工作，大部分的時間都坐在一台停著的車裡。
Two things sit inside the word. The person is private, meaning they are hired by you and answer to you rather than to the police or the government. And the work is watching: following someone, waiting outside a building, looking through papers. LDOCE marks this informal and points you to private detective, which is the plain wording; private investigator, shortened to PI, is the usual job title. Because so many films and novels use the phrase, it also carries a whole storybook feeling of old coats, dark streets and cigarettes, which private detective does not.
這個人不是警察。他是被一般人或公司出錢請來的。所以他只對付錢的人負責。他的工作是盯人、打聽、查資料。LDOCE 把這個說法標成口語（informal）。比較平實的說法是 private detective。正式的職稱通常是 private investigator，縮寫成 PI。private eye 之所以特別，是因為它帶著濃濃的偵探小說味道。一講出來，很多人腦中就出現風衣、夜晚的街道那種畫面。要寫正式一點的文件時，用 private investigator 比較合適。
常見搭配
hire a private eye
雇一個私家偵探
to pay a private detective to find something out for you
They hired a private eye to find out who had been using the account.
work as a private eye
以私家偵探為業
to have this as your job
He worked as a private eye for eight years before he opened a café.
a private eye novel
私家偵探小說
a detective story with a hired investigator as the main character
The shop has a whole shelf of old private eye novels.
core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.
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，摘錄並精簡格式，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.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。