How to Use benighted in a Sentence

benighted

adjective
  • Yet just flipping on the lights wasn't enough to make a benighted bird start crowing.
    — Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 19 Mar. 2013
  • What if problems once thought to be dispatched to a benighted past are back with a vengeance?
    — Washington Post, 11 June 2021
  • There are no borders between those benighted states and ours.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 21 Aug. 2021
  • If or when the elephants die, our own benighted species will surely not be far behind.
    — Justin Chang, New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2026
  • Women will no longer have control over their own bodies in half of this benighted country.
    — Yvonne Abraham, BostonGlobe.com, 24 June 2022
  • Could the benighted tech industry have hit on a better metaphor than a power outage?
    — Adam Lashinsky, Fortune, 11 Jan. 2018
  • The enormous yellow menu offers both milchig and fleishig, dairy and meat, but in my opinion only tourists and the benighted opt for meat.
    — David Remnick, Bon Appetit, 6 June 2018
  • Eventually, months later, about three quarters of the benighted area has power for at least ten hours a day.
    — The Economist, 13 July 2017
  • For this city dweller is no slick deceiver out of Molière or Dickens, but a benighted idiot in his own right.
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 1 June 2017
  • Brayden was as destined for lacrosse as Lucifer was to fall, my freedom and savings the cost of that benighted destiny.
    — Dennard Dayle, The New Yorker, 20 July 2023
  • This point is undoubtedly true, but to use Doris Day movies as an example of a benighted time doesn’t track.
    — New York Times, 27 May 2022
  • Walking down a modern urban thoroughfare, the throb and dynamism of our benighted race is constantly on show.
    — The School Of Life, CNN, 27 May 2020
  • In the most benighted times, these resources included human beings sold into slavery.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 6 Aug. 2021
  • In recent decades an enormous fertility gap has opened between these benighted places and everywhere else.
    — The Economist, 14 Sep. 2017
  • Americans think of Argentina as a benighted third-world nation.
    — Steven Greenhut, Oc Register, 15 Aug. 2025
  • Afterward, the northern Sayyids were scorned as relics of a benighted theocratic era, and many fell into poverty.
    — Robert F. Worth, The Atlantic, 5 Mar. 2024
  • That’s how the album was released in Europe, but for us benighted souls in America, the image was deemed to edgy.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 21 Jan. 2022
  • Repeal the benighted Jones Act, which raises energy and shipping costs.
    — Bloomberg Opinion, Twin Cities, 29 Mar. 2026
  • Repeal the benighted Jones Act, which raises energy and shipping costs.
    — Editorial, Boston Herald, 30 Mar. 2026
  • But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?
    — Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 5 Oct. 2017
  • Fryer risked his career for the sake of his benighted profession and for everyone who was hurt by the pathologizing of their identities.
    — Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct. 2019
  • Against the benighted church Galileo labored, alongside the other great thinkers of the sixteenth century who gave rise to our rational modern age.
    — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 27 Apr. 2018
  • Wiring benighted countries with not-the-latest technology is a very good business for Ericsson—and also the right thing to do.
    — Aaron Pressman, Fortune, 11 June 2018
  • The next few weeks or months will tell whether Tegnell’s strategy is brilliant or—as many experts outside of Sweden believe—benighted.
    — Peter Coy, Bloomberg.com, 16 May 2020
  • The concluding sequence, grubby and majestic, rises to a height of luminous insight that’s also as benighted as all that came before.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2020
  • Perhaps transforming her Democratic colleagues’ attitudes on the benighted agency and its purview might make for a good place for Fudge to start.
    — Morgan Baskin, The New Republic, 14 Dec. 2020
  • Reading about it today in Scull’s narrative is enough to make one’s skin crawl and fill one’s head with wonder at man’s benighted capacity for cruelty in the name of kindness.
    — Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic, 10 July 2022
  • The subsidies and tax incentives showered on north-eastern Pennsylvania are hardly unique; the rich world abounds in efforts to jump-start the economies of benighted places.
    — The Economist, 21 Oct. 2017
  • Many critics judge Elvis’s refusal to abandon a rural, working-class culture as backward and benighted, tempering his artistic success.
    — Michael T. Bertrand, The Conversation, 5 June 2024
  • Fauci had already received death threats from members of this benighted group, resulting in the government placing him under the protection of armed federal agents.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 25 Aug. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'benighted.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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