Peripheral vision, depth perception, and other aspects of eyesight are also critical to vision. 20/20 vision isn’t perfect vision, however, as it only takes into account acuity.

Meaning, you have worse visual acuity and strain more than the average person to see things clearly at a distance. If you have 20/30 vision, the letters you see clearly on the chart at 20 feet, the average person can see clearly from a distance of 30 feet. When you’re standing 20 feet away from the eye chart, you can clearly see each row of letters. If you have 20/20 vision, you have normal acuity and are considered to have good, normal vision. To test your visual acuity, you cover one eye and read the smallest line of letters you can distinguish at a distance of 20 feet (sometimes a mirror is used in small offices to artificially create the distance if you cannot physically stand 20 feet from the chart). From top to bottom, the letters get smaller and the rows feature more and more letters. If you’ve ever had an eye exam, you’ll know this diagnostic tool: It features 11 rows of capital letters. The most commonly used eye chart is the Snellen chart. The numbers refer to visual acuity, or the clarity and sharpness of eyesight.Īn ophthalmologist measures visual acuity using an eye chart. The Etymology of the ExpressionĪs mentioned above, 20/20 has to do with vision and comes from the field of ophthalmology. The 20/20 in the expression can also be spelled out, as twenty-twenty. You’ll also often see or hear variants of this expression, including hindsight is always 20/20 and 20/20 hindsight. I reminded her that hindsight is 20/20 and that she thought she was doing the right thing when she made her choice. My friend was so upset about a bad decision she made recently, but I told her not to beat herself up.I thought my wallet was in there but it wasn’t, so I wasn’t able to pay for my groceries at the store. I should have checked my purse before I left the house, but hindsight is 20/20.Hindsight is 20/20: Now that we lost the competition, I see how our strategy for winning was flawed from the get-go.I can’t believe I dated Adam! He seemed so wonderful at first but turned out to be such a manipulative jerk.Here are some example sentences using the expression hindsight is 20/20: To use another saying, it often describes learning a lesson the hard way. Typically it is used to convey that when we look back at or reflect on a situation or event, we see how we could have done things differently, and usually better. In other words, you can only fully understand an incident once it has passed. Putting the two terms together, we can determine that the phrase hindsight is 20/20 means that things become obvious about an event or situation after it has happened that you can see things clearly about and evaluate your choices once you’ve made them, in a more complete way than you can beforehand. You also need to know the definition of 20/20: These numbers pertain to eyesight and are used to describe good, clear vision. To get the meaning of this phrase, you first need to know the definition of the word hindsight: the perception or understanding of an event/situation after it has occurred.

Hindsight examples