Nearsighted means you can see things clearly when they're close to you, but things far away look blurry and out of focus. If you're nearsighted, you can read a book easily, but the writing on the classroom whiteboard might look fuzzy unless you sit in the front row. Street signs become readable only when you're almost underneath them.

The medical term for being nearsighted is myopia. It happens when your eyeball grows slightly longer than usual, which causes light to focus in front of your retina instead of directly on it. About one in three people are nearsighted, and it often starts in elementary or middle school. Kids might not realize they're nearsighted at first: they just think everyone sees distant things as blurry shapes.

Glasses or contact lenses fix nearsightedness by adjusting how light enters your eye, bringing distant objects back into sharp focus. The opposite condition is called farsightedness, where close-up things look blurry but distant objects appear clear.

People sometimes use nearsighted metaphorically to describe someone who only thinks about immediate problems without considering long-term consequences, like a student who only studies for tomorrow's quiz while ignoring the big test next week.