I remembered I was in a meeting and my colleague made a suggestion to another colleague so that they could ‘catch people’s eyeballs.’ 

At first, I couldn’t believe what I heard. ‘Eyeballs?’ I thought to myself and then I had an image in my mind of a person’s hands catching some very bloodied eyeballs…

Then I thought this person was using this expression to mean wanting to catch people’s attention. Right? I asked my colleagues, and I learned that they do in fact  say ‘抓住他们的眼球’ in Chinese to mean catching people’s attention.

And if you don’t know any better, you’d say ‘catch people’s eyeballs’ in English wanting to establish the same meaning. Your audience would probably give you a blank look or worse a look of shock.

In English, there’s a similar expression to mean the same thing, but we don’t use eyeballs. 

We just use ‘eye’. We’d use:

‘Catch someone’s eye’ – yes, this expression uses a singular ‘eye’ even though we have two eyes. We are describing the ‘moment’ that got our attention, and most often it’s from the corner of our eye. If we’re using both our eyes then we’re already focused and paying attention.

Example

• He lit a cigarette while he tried to catch the waiter's eye.
• A small red car passing by caught my eye.
• One of the books on the top shelf caught my eye, and I took it down to look at it. 
• They used a really bright color for their advertisement hoping to catch people’s eyes. (plural for more than 1 person)