Hindsight is the clear understanding you only get after it is over. With hindsight, the benefit of hindsight, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
It is the standard word for judging a decision by what happened rather than by what was known at the time, and hindsight bias is the well-documented tendency to think an outcome was obvious once you know it. Hindsight is a wonderful thing is what people say when they are being blamed. Note foresight, which is the opposite and much rarer.
1nounhindsightThe clear understanding you only get after it is over.
“In hindsight, I should have taken the job in London.”
hindsight is an after-the-fact understanding.
HINDsight → seeing what was beHIND you
Looking behind you at what already happened, far too late to change any of it, and every part of it now looks obvious.
hooks ontobehind
Hind plus sight, formed in the nineteenth century on the model of foresight. Hind means at the back, as in hind legs.
From hind + sight, 19th c. Compare Latinate retrospect.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA