How To Read Your Eye Prescription

On any prescription pd can be written in different ways.

How to read your eye prescription. Because contacts sit directly on the eye the prescription is different than one for eyeglasses. A higher number regardless of whether there is a plus or minus sign means you ll need a stronger prescription. From there you ll hold your glasses between the phone and the screen for various readings. If you need a prism for one or both eyes it will look similar to this. We can provide lenses with a prism correction but you ll need to contact us to discuss this.

Re stands for right eye. Some prescriptions have this figure which looks like a sideways 8. A plus sign or no sign means you re farsighted. E g 62 single pd 33 31 dual pd or 62 60 distance pd near pd. If the number contains a minus sign it means it is correcting nearsighted astigmatism.

Cylinder abbreviated cyl follows sphere power in your eyeglass prescription. Similarly to the sph there. Sphere sph and cylinder cyl always have a or sign. Before filling a prescription you also need what s called a contact lens fitting to see if they re right for you. They are latin abbreviations.

Le stands for you guessed it left eye. If this column is blank it means you have no astigmatism. You might see this instead of od because some optometrists have stopped using the latin names. These are not needed to make your lenses. So the numbers and letters corresponding to the os row or column may not match your right eye.

If you re near sighted or far sighted check the sph column to find out how strong your lenses need to be. It indicates the amount of lens power needed to correct astigmatism measured in diopters. Os oculus sinister means the left eye and od oculus. A contact lens prescription includes measurements specific to the size and brand of your contacts. The first step to understanding your eyeglass prescription is knowing what od and os mean.