LookingGlass

Looking-glass, looking glass, or looking glass is a term historically used to refer to a mirror. The compound combines looking (from look) and glass, and it appears in Middle English writings as an archaic or literary form. In modern usage, mirror is the common term, while looking-glass or looking glass survives mainly in older texts, poetic language, or as part of proper names and titles.

In literature, the looking-glass is perhaps best known from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Carroll’s work, a girl named Alice passes through a mirror into a mirrored world where logic and geography are inverted and where chess motifs guide the narrative. The book popularized the looking-glass as a device representing reversal, reflection, and alternate realities, and it has influenced later fantasy and surreal works.

Beyond Carroll, the term has appeared in various cultural contexts as a metaphor for reflection, portals to alternate versions of reality, or inverted mirrors of the familiar. In contemporary writing, looking-glass imagery is most often encountered as a literary allusion or in titles and brand names rather than as a standard everyday term. The general synonym for the object remains mirror, with looking-glass reserved for established phrases and stylistic uses.