Retrospect is the backward look — how things appear once they are over. Everything is clearer from here.
The word almost never stands alone and lives in the phrase in retrospect, which introduces a judgement made with the benefit of knowing what happened. That is also its danger, since in retrospect everything looks obvious and nobody had that information at the time. Hindsight is the near synonym, and the proverb about hindsight being twenty-twenty makes exactly the same point.
1nounretrospectA view of a past event with the knowledge of what followed.
“In retrospect we should never have gone.”
Also accepted in games: hindsight
Retrospect is the backward look. Latin retrōspicere joins retro, backwards, to a verb meaning to look, the same one standing behind spectator and inspect.
Proto-Indo-European
*speḱ-
Latin
retrōspectum
English, today
retrospect
Built from
Borrowed from Latin retrōspectum, from retrōspicio (“to look back at”), equivalent to retro + spect. Compare review.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA