blindness

American  

[blahynd-nis] / ˈblaɪnd nɪs /

noun

• blindnesses
  plural

1. the inability to see; the condition of having severely impaired or absolutely no sense of sight.

   Patients are first asked if their blindness is congenital or the result of injury or disease.

2. an unwillingness or inability to perceive or understand; lack of judgment; ignorance.

   Your blindness to this behavior has allowed his anxiety to worsen.

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blindness Scientific  

/ blīnd′nĭs /

1. A lack or impairment of vision in which maximal visual acuity after correction by refractive lenses is one-tenth normal vision or less in the better eye. Blindness can be genetic but is usually acquired as a result of injury, cataracts, or diseases such as glaucoma or diabetes. In Asia and Africa, trachoma is a common infectious cause of blindness.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• blindnesses
  plural

Etymology

Origin of blindness

First recorded before 1000; blind ( def. ) + -ness ( def. )

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

blindness blindnesses

"Secondly, greys have squirrel pox - it doesn't affect them but they transmit it to red squirrels and it's fatal for them. It's a horrible disease and causes them ulcers and blindness."

From BBC ● Sep. 20, 2026

Questions poured forth afterward about leadership, difficult personalities, education, institutional blindness, younger generations and whether children would still be able to distinguish between what is real and what is synthetic.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026

Together, these disorders affect about 200 million people worldwide and rank among the leading causes of visual impairment and blindness.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 28, 2026

Vision issues are a distinctive red flag, particularly blurry vision, trouble looking at bright lights, and in some cases complete blindness.

From BBC ● Jul. 15, 2026

In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too.

From "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes

What seems particularly unfortunate about the break is that each man had an acute sense of the other’s blindnesses.

From The New Yorker ● Oct. 7, 2019

Yet reviewing also reflects an era’s biases and blindnesses; even food writers’ tastes shift with the times.

From The New Yorker ● Mar. 7, 2016

Helen has her raffish and unscrupulous side but is also capable of engineering her own breakthroughs of insight, and of looking at her blindnesses square on.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 21, 2013

He does the audience the honor of allowing it to discover the blindnesses and obsessions, the sober lunacies he quietly lays out on the screen.

From Time Magazine Archive

"How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires," quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.

From Morality as a Religion An exposition of some first principles by W. R. Washington Sullivan

Related Words

• defect
• myopia