Is there single word that means "all seeing"?
From what I can tell, omniscient is often used to cover this, but that more accurately means "all knowing". It likely stems from a presumption that if you can see all, you know all.
Nevertheless, I'm looking for a word that means specifically "all seeing". Would it be something like omnivisient?
Best Answer
The only actual Latin word that means ‘all-seeing’ which I can find is omnituens, which is frightfully rare and poetic even in Latin, and doesn’t seem to have been used more than a small handful of times in English—half of them being people telling others that there’s no such word.
I would not advise using that.
Then there’s omnipercipient, which is at least an English word, though still not a common one. It clearly means ‘all-perceiving’, but that’s quite close to ‘all-seeing’, and the OED defines it as “seeing or perceiving everything”.
All in all, though, I think you’d be better off with Greek than Latin here. The Ancient Greeks had tons of verbs meaning ‘see’ in various shades, and a few were combined with the prefix pan(t)- ‘all’, the Greek counterpart to Latin omni-. Thus, for instance, πανόπτης panóptēs means ‘all-seeing’ and has actually come down to us in English as panoptic, which has two separate meanings: OED
In addition, there is pantoscopic, which is most commonly used as a synonym for bifocal (describing glasses and lenses), but also has a more generic meaning: OED