Other forms: visions
Vision is the sense you see with, and how well your eyes deliver the world to you. An optician checking your vision with a chart of shrinking letters, headlights struggling through fog, the blurred vision you get from standing up too fast.
The second vision is the one in speeches and job adverts: a clear picture of a future somebody wants to build. A founder has a vision for the company, and a leader with vision sees further than the next three months. A third kind of vision is the sort that visits you, in a dream or a trance, something appearing that is not really there. Fixed pairs are everywhere: 20/20 vision, night vision, field of vision, and tunnel vision for a person who can see nothing beyond their own concern. The adjective from the future sense is visionary, while the adjective from the eyes is visual.
1nouneyesightThe ability to see.~90%
“His vision is poor in one eye, so he sits near the front.”
2nounvisionA clear idea of what the future could be, together with the imagination to plan for it.~8%
“She laid out her vision for the school over the next ten years.”
3nounseenSomething seen in a dream or a religious experience, or a picture that forms in the mind.~2%
“He had a vision of the whole valley under water.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Vision came through Middle English visioun and Old French from Latin vīsiō, a seeing, built on the verb videō, I see. The Latin word named the act itself, which is why English vision covers both the eyes doing their job and the picture that forms behind them. Video and visible grew from the same root.
Proto-Indo-European
*weyd-
Latin
vīsiō — vision, seeing
Old French
vision
Anglo-Norman
visioun
Middle English
visioun
English, today
vision
Built from
From Middle English visioun, from Anglo-Norman visioun, from Old French vision, from Latin vīsiō (“vision, seeing”), noun of action from the perfect passive participle visus (“that which is seen”), from the verb videō (“to see”) + action noun suffix -iō.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA