[syn: benighted, dark]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
benight \be*night"\ (b[-e]*n[imac]t"), v. t. [imp. & p. p.
Benighted; p. pr. & vb. n. Benighting.]
1. To involve in darkness; to shroud with the shades of
night; to obscure. [Archaic]
[1913 Webster]
The clouds benight the sky. --Garth.
[1913 Webster]
2. To overtake with night or darkness, especially before the
end of a day's journey or task.
[1913 Webster]
Some virgin, sure, . . . benighted in these woods.
--Milton.
[1913 Webster]
3. To involve in moral darkness, or ignorance; to debar from
intellectual light.
[1913 Webster]
Shall we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny ? --Heber.
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
benighted
adj 1: overtaken by night or darkness; "benighted (or nighted)
travelers hurrying toward home" [syn: benighted,
nighted]
2: lacking enlightenment or knowledge or culture; "this
benighted country"; "benighted ages of barbarism and
superstition"; "the dark ages"; "a dark age in the history of
education" [syn: benighted, dark]
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:
39 Moby Thesaurus words for "benighted":
ableptical, amaurotic, backward, bereft of light, blind,
color-blind, dark, dim-sighted, empty-headed, eyeless, hemeralopic,
ignorant, illiterate, in darkness, in the dark, know-nothing,
mind-blind, naive, night-overtaken, nyctalopic, rayless, sightless,
spiritually blind, stark blind, stone-blind, undiscerning,
uneducated, unenlightened, uninformed, uninstructed, unlettered,
unobserving, unperceiving, unprogressive, unschooled, unseeing,
untaught, untutored, visionless