If you are long-sighted, your eyes handle far-away things better than near ones. A street sign across the road may look fine, but a book, a phone screen, or a menu in your hands is not clear — you may hold it farther away to read it. This is the usual British way of talking about that kind of eyesight. In American English, people more often say farsighted. Glasses or contact lenses can help. In ordinary talk, older people who start needing reading glasses are often called long-sighted too, even though doctors sometimes split that from the condition a person is born with. The tidy opposite for eyes is short-sighted in British English and nearsighted in American English: those people see near things well and far things poorly. This entry is about the eyes. English also lets far-sighted mean 'good at thinking about the future,' and some people stretch long-sighted that way as well — but here the word is the seeing word.