Right Eye Twitching: Meaning for Women and Men, and Why It Differs

This passage usually gets thrown in without a source, and in fact there are several. Monier Williams, Oxford professor of Sanskrit, notes that men get the right side good omens and women get the reverse (1876). Penzer says the same thing for Sanskrit literature almost fifty years later (1924).

The strongest evidence for the laterality rule comes from Somadeva's eleventh-century Kathāsaritsāgara, a big collection of stories in Sanskrit. In chapter 22 it says that if your right eye throbs you might expect your lover to show up soon.

In chapter 117 the rule is reversed. It now applies to women. The story goes that a woman's right eye starts throbbing. This could never have been made up in modern times.

Kālidāsa also reverses an earlier statement of the laterality rule within his own single play Śakuntalā (act 1). In act V, when the hero's wife notices her right eye throbbing she asks why. Her friend tells her that it is a warning against evil, which seems to be a reversal of the statement in act 1. A printed commentary explains what this means for women.

Finally we have an ancient list which says that certain signs are auspicious ("good") for men but inauspicious ("bad" or "evil") for women. This list comes from Varāhamihira's compendium, the Bṛhat Saṃhitā, a sixth-century collection of lore.

The gender rule you often hear about isn't a one-off. It fits into how people have looked at twitch omens for thousands of years.

For instance, the main Greek book on reading twitches — it goes back to the legendary soothsayer Melampus, from manuscripts made in the third century AD — uses different rules depending on whether you're rich or poor, free or enslaved. One rule for an eye tells us that a twitch might mean different things for a poor man (good news), an enslaved person (something bad coming your way), a virgin (scandal), a widow, a wealthy person (feasting), a soldier (advance). Some texts use the same kind of branching in Arabic or Hebrew, like: if some part of you twitches, and that's for someone enslaved, it means this; if that's for a bride, this; and if for a widow, this.

The honest way to put it is not "everyone used to do the thing with eyes where left was good, right was bad," but rather: "people have long said that reading twitches can depend on who you are" — Greek, Arabic, Jewish, Indian alike.

I've seen an authentic Chinese table for interpreting twitching eyes, and I think you'll find it very interesting. It's not the same as the one that gets used most places online.

Its origin isn't the almanac everybody cites. The eye interpretation comes from the book Baiguai duanjing by Yu Hui during the Song dynasty, preserved in the collection called Shuofu and reprinted in the Qing encyclopedia, where it's credited to him.

That popular almanac is a later carrier of this same material — and the Daoist edition of that almanac doesn't even have this section of it. The two aren't the same thing at all.

This table shows omens for right in 12-hour pairs:

23:00–1:00: Wine and food 1:00–3:00: Someone is thinking about you 5:00–7:00: Peacefulness 7:00–9:00: Harm 13:00–15:00: Joy 15:00–17:00: Scholarly matters 17:00–19:00: A visitor

It doesn't distinguish between men and women.

It's not new at all. Even during the first century BCE, the miscellany says "when an eye twitches you get wine and food" and adds that this was a spell against it — in other words, this already had an interpretation then. Then in the second century CE Cai Yong pairs these omens: "a twitching eyelid and ringing ears are minor warnings in advance."

If you compare an almanac written in English to the Chinese text from which it is translated, about a third of the cells will disagree. Some are outright inversions. At 申 (15:00–17:00), the Chinese left-eye entry gives wealth; English says that you will lose money and should not gamble. For 戌 (19:00–21:00), "joy" or "food and drink," according to Chinese, becomes a warning of possible bad temper leading to arguments.

Many other differences are from adding modern specifics, including things like traffic safety or religious advice that could not have been there in the Song dynasty when the original was written. The chart is a descendant of an earlier one copied many times, with details filled in over time.

The earliest reference to twitch divination in Greek literature comes from the poetry of Theocritus. There, a goatherd is waiting outside his beloved's cave when his right eye begins to move, and he wonders whether he'll be seeing her.

The translator who published this line adds a note explaining what the twitch would have meant: a good omen.

But when we look at the Greek manual on twitches that was written not long after, we see something different. It says that both eyes are broadly favourable: A twitch of the right eye means that your enemies will be subdued and travellers brought home; a twitch of the left one means that someone much loved from abroad has arrived, or you can expect to travel yourself — or it might also mean good news for women.

The unfavourable readings are linked not with sides but with the lower lids and particular corners of the eye. A twitch of the right lid below would be interpreted as "tears", while a twitch of the left one would signify unpleasantness.

In the fourth century CE the priest John Chrysostom was so angry at people who believed in this kind of thing that he went into the pulpit and quoted "My right eye leaps below — this is a sign of tears." That's exactly what the Greek manual recorded too: it tells us how precisely its followers interpreted twitch divination.

What we learn from all this is that in classical Greece right eye good, left eye bad was not considered to be an ancient and established rule. When he came across the line about the goatherd's twitching eye, a later scholiast who explained Greek poetry drew no distinction between the right side and the left.

The same practice was followed in Rome under another name. There were practitioners called salisatores ("twitch diviners"), who thought that when any part of their limbs twitched, this meant they could foretell "something either prosperous or sad for them" — even if the twitches themselves happened to the rest of their bodies.

The word used for an eye's itch differs from place to place. German has Jucken — the sense of touch being tickled and stimulated. The record in Tyrol uses beisst (as a dog or animal might bite) while Russian says чешется — as if something scratchy was brushing over it like sandpaper. Danish folklorists used klør, which meant to claw at someone with your hands.

The seventeenth century English sources said that the eye itcheth. But this word has a long history in folklore in England. Theocritus wrote in Ancient Greek about how an eye leaps or twitches. Thomas Creech's translation in 1684 changed it to saying that your right eye itches before you can see a lover arrive.

Folklore records from many countries say different things about the left and right eyes. A nineteenth century writer Adolf Wuttke collected all four possibilities for what the left or right eye itches means from different regions in Silesia, Bavaria, Tyrol and Prussia. Even Jacob Grimm made mistakes with the meaning.

The Danish lexicographer Henning Feilberg knew this problem well but admitted there was no easy solution to it:

regelen er dog usikker, which roughly translates into English as “but the rule is uncertain”.

Another collector, Walter Gregor collected folkloric sayings about an eye's itch from Scotland. In contrast with European practice in this domain, he said that an itching of your eyes meant you would cry.

None of these sources makes the omen gender-specific. Such gendered ideas are not found in folkloric materials about eyes twitching before they see someone.

The Ottoman Turks had their own equivalent of a seğirnâme. This collection of omens ran head to toe, right side then left and didn't have daily or hourly sections.

The eye had a special section that was twenty-one entries long out of one hundred and thirty-eight. This section included the different bits of the eye itself as well as the pupil. The right eye was sometimes said to be more unlucky than the left. A modern saying in Turkish says exactly the opposite: bad omens from the left eye, good news from the right.

A printed manual also disagreed with the popular idea that the left eye showed bad luck. For example, if your right lower lid was twitching then this omen foretold weeping so give alms to avoid this misfortune. In contrast, the Jewish and Greek sources didn't have cures.

Your eyelid might start doing this fine rippling motion called “myokymia” that’s caused by muscles firing out-of-step around the eye. It’s benign (harmless) and common enough that it happens to most people at some point in their lives, so you shouldn't worry too much.

The known triggers are unglamorous: stress; tiredness; alcohol and caffeine; nicotine; bright lights; dry or irritated eyes; wind. Spending a lot of time on screens has been shown by research to increase the risk (a 2024 study found people with eye twitching averaged almost seven hours of screen-time per day).

On magnesium. The most popular suggestion I’ve seen in online health forums is that there’s a link to magnesium deficiency — but a study published in 2024 specifically tested that theory and could find no difference in the amount of magnesium present between people who suffer eye twitching and people who don’t. It says the idea may have come from patients who turned up for help with their eyelid already taking magnesium on advice they’d read online. (Magnesium isn’t mentioned as a possible cause by the NHS, Mayo, or any other major medical website.)

When not to worry: two conditions sometimes get mistaken for ordinary eye-twitching — and these are things you should seek medical help about straightaway if you think your twitch is either of them:

1. Benign essential blepharospasm which usually affects both eyes, can start as an eye-twitch but gets steadily worse over time; and it causes the lids to close completely when they twitch.
2. Hemifacial spasm, a rare condition that starts in one side of the face (typically around the eye). If you think this is what’s happening, do see your doctor: symptoms typically include involuntary muscle contraction starting with the eyelids and spreading downwards towards other parts of the face.

If the twitchy eyelid isn’t going away within a few weeks; if it’s keeping one eye closed most of the time and making it difficult to open either lid when it twitches; if there are muscles in other areas of your face that feel weak or stiff too; if you’ve got pain, swelling, inflammation or discharge from the eye.

Very rarely there's neurological causes behind these sort of things so having some professional advice about whether everything’s ok is always good just in case.