The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of near metrizability for topological spaces, which is strictly weaker than the concept of metrizability. A number of characterizations of nearly metrizable spaces is achieved here as analogues of the corresponding ones for metrizable spaces. It is seen that near metrizability is a natural idea vis-a-vis near paracompactness, playing the similar role as played by paracompactness with regard to metrizability. © AGT, UPV, 2013.