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.

---

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.

---

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

The club warned people not to attempt to look through binoculars or telescopes which did not have proper solar filters as they could collect more light than the human eye could cope with, risking blindness.

From BBC ● Aug. 11, 2026

This can cause sudden partial or complete blindness in one or both eyes.

From Science Daily ● May 23, 2026

Where the blindness becomes astonishing is that the actual military situation isn’t the one being described to us with unhealthy delight.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 21, 2026

Tatel is legally blind and seemingly feared that the justice would act with factual blindness.

From Slate ● May 7, 2026

Among the reasons he and others have cited for the blindness of the affluent is the fact that they are less and less likely to share spaces and services with the poor.

From "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich

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

As a kind of self-made king, he falls into the first of his blindnesses, the idea that he can give away his possessions and his crown and yet retain power in his person alone.

From Time Magazine Archive

He looked like the kind of man who lived on the blindnesses of others.

From The Enchanted Barn by Grace Livingston Hill

Related Words

• defect
• myopia