be·night·ed

(bĭ-nī′tĭd)

adj.

1. Overtaken by night or darkness.

2. Being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness; unenlightened.

be·night′ed·ly adv.

be·night′ed·ness n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

benightedness

noun

The condition of being ignorant; lack of knowledge or learning:

ignorance, illiteracy, illiterateness, nescience.

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References in periodicals archive

Reading The New York Times, we traditional-minded Jews often grumble that the Paper of Record rarely misses an opportunity to dismiss our way of seeing the world as so much benightedness. If our faith makes it into the Times at all, it's most likely to celebrate those who call it into question or to outright reject any attempt to speak of it coherently and movingly.

The New York Times Religious War: 'Wokenism' vs. the Catholic Church

Irfan et al1 and Nizar et al11 have reported that public hospitals in Pakistan are not focused primarily on quality treatment due to several reasons including low priority for patients satisfaction, poor education, benightedness, in science of patients and above all limited budget quality of treatment and patient satisfaction both are essential in monitoring and evaluating healthcare14 services.

FEEDBACK ANALYSIS OF PATIENTS IN A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL

The heuristic is effective when benightedness is consistently and not arbitrarily scattered.

Heuristic reasoning in the psychology of mathematics education

African Americans then began to accept Alexander Crummell's view that "The sad and startling fact, that mental and moral benightedness has enshrouded the whole of the vast continent of Africa, through all the records of time, far back, to the earliest records of history.

Fractal complexity in Alexander Crummell's The Future of Africa

When the rite is resumed, the priest chants a long invocation exhorting humans' benightedness to the empty nature of worldly desire as death reverts everything to emptiness ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], xiuxiang, 66:896).

A negative poetics: desire and death in the Xiuxiang Jin Ping Mei

Ridgeon's benightedness is of less interest in this context, however, than the fact that he has been knighted.

Play doctor, doctor death: Shaw, Ibsen, and modern tragedy

Virginia, "is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded." (24) While such progress narratives might very well be, according to their skeptics, "progress myths" or even "phony history,'" (25) they are nevertheless extremely seductive for those legal actors who aspire to read legal history as reflecting an ascent from relative benightedness to relative enlightenment.

From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law