How To Read Vision Prescription

These are latin abbreviations with os standing for oculus sinister or left eye and od standing for oculus dextrus or right eye.

How to read vision prescription. Additionally read the cyl column to find the strength of lens you need to correct astigmatism. If you want to learn how to read prescriptions for glasses you must start with decoding the acronyms and abbreviations commonly found in them. They are latin abbreviations. In a typical prescription like the one above you ll find these abbreviations on the left side. When you look at your prescription for eyeglasses you will see numbers listed under the headings of os and od.

They are abbreviations for oculus dexter and oculus sinister which are latin terms for right eye and left eye your eyeglass prescription also may have a column labeled ou. Sphere sph the sphere column is often abbreviated as sph. Nv your prescription might also contain the abbreviations dv distance vision or nv near vision. The following tips can help people read their eye prescriptions. This is short for oculus dexter and is your right eye.

To read an eyeglass prescription look for the labels o d and o s which stand for right eye and left eye respectively. This is the lens power needed to fix your vision. Os oculus sinister means the left eye and od oculus. Dv is the portion of your prescription which corrects your ability to see things far away. This is what they all mean.

Positive numbers such as 1 00 explain how strong a lens needs to be to correct for farsightedness. After an exam your doctor will prescribe eyeglasses or contact lenses or both. This number always has a sign. If your prescription doesn t have a second or third number you most likely don t have astigmatism. If you re near sighted or far sighted check the sph column to find out how strong your lenses need to be.

Identify a sign. The first step to understanding your eyeglass prescription is knowing what od and os mean. The first thing you might notice when looking at your prescription is two abbreviations os and od. The type of rx glasses may be noted on a prescription such as dv distance vision nearsightedness and nv near vision reading. For multi focal glasses as well as reading and computer glasses your rx will include an add or nv value.