rear sight

American

noun

the sight nearest the breech of a firearm.

rear sight British

noun

the sight of a gun nearest to the breech

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

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rear sight

A gun's rear sight and a musket side plate found nearby offer some support for that interpretation.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 22, 2026

By his read, this is the rear sight of from a DShK variant, a .50-caliber machine gun.

From New York Times ● Oct. 27, 2011

I've managed to get the ring of the front sight to sit just inside the slightly larger ring of the rear sight.

From Time Magazine Archive

In addition, it has a fold-down adjustable rear sight and a Truglo fiber-optic front sight.

From Time Magazine Archive

To teach uniformity in sighting,—that is, to teach you how to take the same amount of sight each time,—to see every time the same amount of front sight when you look through the rear sight.

From Manual of Military Training Second, Revised Edition by James A. (James Alfred) Moss

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023