twinkle [OE] As well as its original sense ‘to sparkle, glimmer’, twinkle also meant ‘to wink, blink the eyes’ from the 14th to the early 19th century. The meaning ‘the time taken to wink or blink’—a very short time, in other words—is just as old, but it survives only as in the twinkling of an eye, ‘very quickly’. This is probably because the phrase appears in various passages in the Bible, including Corinthians: ‘In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ A similar expression containing the same idea is in the blink of an eye.