benighted
Americanadjective
-
intellectually or morally ignorant; unenlightened.
benighted ages of barbarism and superstition.
- Synonyms:
- uncultivated, crude, primitive, backward
-
overtaken by darkness or night.
adjective
-
lacking cultural, moral, or intellectual enlightenment; ignorant
-
archaic overtaken by night
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of benighted
Explanation
Being called benighted is much like being called naive. It means lacking in knowledge or understanding—the kind you might have if you were older or more sophisticated. Although it sounds a lot like "being knighted", benighted has nothing to do with knights and, in fact, includes the word "night" (as in the opposite of day) and not "knight" (as in "of the Round Table"). One way to remember what benighted means is to think of a person "being nighted" or, put into the dark. A benighted person is in the dark about things: they don't know because they can't see. The Dark Ages are thought to have been a benighted time, full of primitive ideas.
Vocabulary lists containing benighted
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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The Once and Future King
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"On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Phenomenal amounts of self-righteous bloviating about enlightened or benighted child-feeding have gone on for centuries.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026
It’s more like an existential dilemma, both for our bewildered and benighted country and for the world.
From Salon ● Jan. 3, 2026
The first two PMs in this benighted parliament – Barnier and Bayrou – took weeks to find.
From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025
The End — the big one — is prefigured in “Endgame,” Samuel Beckett’s bracing portrait of humanity’s benighted shuffle to doomsday.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 6, 2023
He believed as firmly as Arthur did, as firmly as the benighted Christian, that there was such a thing as Right Finally, there was the impediment of his nature.
From "The Once and Future King" by T. H. White
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
