bifocals
noun
bifocals is a noun meaning “Spectacles that have corrective lenses of two different powers; used by people who need both distance and reading glasses” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled B-I-F-O-C-A-L-S and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 11 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does bifocals mean?
noun
- 1
Spectacles that have corrective lenses of two different powers; used by people who need both distance and reading glasses.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce bifocals?
Bifocals has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is bifocals?
Bifocals appears about once in every 11 million words in written English, the 101,613th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Bifocals in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense spectacles with two different powers:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | verres bifocaux, verres double foyer |
| German | Bifokalbrille, Zweistärkenbrille |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does bifocals come from?
From bi- + focal (see focus), coined in 1824 by John Isaac Hawkins, inventor of trifocals. When the concept of bifocals was originally conceived by Benjamin Franklin, he called them double spectacles.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).