''benight'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

↩ 🔳 🔳 🔳

---

Primary

⁀➴

''benight'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904152658-00-⌔

benight - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

benight (third-person singular simple present benights, present participle benighting, simple past and past participle benighted) (archaic, transitive)

• (chiefly passive voice) To overtake (a traveller etc) with the darkness of night, especially before shelter is reached.
  • ✤ How far might I have been on my way by this time! I am made to tread thoſe ſteps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once: Yea now alſo I am like to be benighted, for the day is almost ſpent.¹
  • ✤ [H]e struck off the common road, to take the benefit of a nearer cut; and finding himself benighted near a village, took up his lodging at the first inn to which his horse directed him.²
  • ✤ The public road, however, was tolerably well-made and safe, so that the prospect of being benighted brought with it no real danger.³
• To darken; to shroud or obscure.
  • ✤ The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;/Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.⁴
• To plunge or be overwhelmed in moral or intellectual darkness.
  • ✤ Can we whose souls are lighted
    With Wisdom from on high,
    Can we to men benighted
    The lamp of life deny?⁵

Etymology

From Middle English benyghten, binighten, bynyȝten, equivalent to be- +‎ night.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /bɪˈnaɪt/
• (General American) IPA: /bɪˈnaɪt/, /bə-/
• Homophone: beknight
• Hyphenation: be‧night
• Rhymes: -aɪt

Printed 2026-09-04.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1678, John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That which is to Come: […], London: […] Nath[aniel] Ponder […], →OCLC, page 47: ↩

2. 1751, [Tobias] Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume, London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC: ↩

3. 1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter I, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and Archibald Constable and Co., […], →OCLC, page 4: ↩

4. 1922 October, A[lfred] E[dward] Housman, “[Poem] XXV: The Oracles”, in Last Poems, London: Grant Richards Ltd., →OCLC, stanza 4, page 51, lines 13–14: ↩

5. 1819, Reginald Heber, The Missionary Hymn ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

Link to original

Secondary

• • •

---