sight bill
- noun
- /saɪt bɪl/
- Formal
- Payment is required upon presentation of the sight bill at the bank.
Examples
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A sight bill must be paid immediately.
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The exporter opted to use a sight bill to reduce the risk of non-payment.
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Many international transactions are settled through the use of a sight bill.
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The company presented a sight bill to the bank.
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Payment is required upon presentation of the sight bill at the bank.
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The exporter opted to use a sight bill to reduce the risk of non-payment.
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Many international transactions are settled through the use of a sight bill.
Synonyms
A paper telling you how much you must pay
A written bill that is paid at once when shown to the person who must pay
A written order telling one person or bank to pay money to another at a set time
Surface Forms
Morphology
sight + bill
The phrase uses a specialized financial sense of 'sight' (meaning 'on presentation' or 'payable at sight') that is not the common visual meaning B1 learners know, and the combined meaning requires domain-specific knowledge about bills of exchange. Knowing 'bill' as a money document is insufficient for deriving the technical sense, so the expression is not predictable from its parts.
Etymology
Sight bill comes from sight meaning 'seeing' and bill meaning a payment paper. The image is simple: when the bank sees the bill being shown it must pay right away, so the term means a bill payable 'immediately' on presentation.