What is another word for benighted?

Pronunciation: [bɪnˈa͡ɪtɪd] (IPA)

When we think of the word "benighted," we often associate it with a lack of knowledge or understanding. However, there are several synonyms that convey similar meanings. For example, the word "ignorant" denotes a lack of knowledge or understanding, while "unenlightened" suggests a lack of cultural or intellectual sophistication. "Backward" and "uncivilized" evoke a sense of primitive or outdated thinking, while "naïve" and "unsophisticated" imply a lack of worldly experience or knowledge. Ultimately, the synonym you choose will depend on the context and the tone you want to convey. Whether you use "benighted" or one of its many synonyms, the sentiment remains the same - that there is a dearth of knowledge or understanding in the situation at hand.

Synonyms for Benighted:

What are the paraphrases for Benighted?

Paraphrases are restatements of text or speech using different words and phrasing to convey the same meaning.
Paraphrases are highlighted according to their relevancy:
- highest relevancy
- medium relevancy
- lowest relevancy

What are the hypernyms for Benighted?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

What are the opposite words for benighted?

The term benighted can be described as being in a state of ignorance or lacking knowledge. Antonyms for the word benighted may include enlightened, educated or knowledgeable, learned and insightful. When a person is enlightened, they have an understanding of different topics, as they have had a chance to explore different areas of knowledge. Education, on the other hand, expands an individual's learning capacity and provides them with the necessary tools to gain knowledge. When a person is knowledgeable, they possess a broad understanding of a subject or many subjects. Lastly, insightful applies to those with the talent for visualizing the essence of a matter or situation quickly.

Usage examples for Benighted

Nevertheless, slowly, very slowly, the light dawned in their benighted minds, and that which they could not comprehend with their heads they understood with their warm hearts.
"In Desert and Wilderness"
Henryk Sienkiewicz
But apparently neither of these benighted heathens could distinguish between the "Free" and the "Wee Free," or the "U. P." or the "Established" and took us to the English Church.
"From Edinburgh to India & Burmah"
William G. Burn Murdoch
My mind too seemed to be making an endless pilgrimage through wet and benighted streets, far from its rest; and even that strange hallucination of Louie's protection had left me now.
"The Debit Account"
Oliver Onions

Famous quotes with Benighted

  • The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
    Marcel Proust
  • Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most “obvious,” “accurate,” and “natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.
    Stephen Jay Gould
  • [T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the “culture wars” that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general […]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline.
    Stephen Jay Gould
  • There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.
    Aldous Huxley
  • Poverty and inequality like this should cause Europeans to cringe in horror, especially since (we have it on good authority) there is no safety net in America, no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute--not the slightest bit of social solidarity. In the U.S. "only the most fortunate have the right to medical care and to grow old with dignity," as one writer recently put it in Libération. University courses are reserved only for those who can pay, which partly explains the "low level of education" in the benighted US.
    Jean-François Revel

Semantically related words: dark, night, darkness, black, nighttime, dark of night

Related questions:

  • What does benighted mean?
  • Word of the Day

    multitasker
    The word "multitasker" usually refers to someone who can perform different tasks simultaneously. However, there are several antonyms for this word, which describe the opposite type...