How to Use the Enlightenment in a Sentence

the Enlightenment

noun
  • Some sections of the right have looked further back, targeting the Enlightenment.
    — Ali Breland, The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2026
  • For me, that’s about the Enlightenment era of reading and expanding your horizons, which shows an openness.
    — Adriane Quinlan, Curbed, 6 Feb. 2025
  • But around the Enlightenment, things started clicking.
    — Darian Woods, NPR, 14 Oct. 2025
  • This idea filtered down through Western thought and was amplified in the Enlightenment era.
    — Aja Romano, Vox, 7 Dec. 2024
  • The pictures ranged from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
    — Ian Malone, Vogue, 21 Sep. 2023
  • Faith in the Enlightenment and European progress was destroyed.
    — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2025
  • Like the clockwork deity of the Enlightenment, Satoshi set everything in motion only to step aside.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2024
  • Nef, as a good historian of thought, did not neglect the many sources besides the Enlightenment that led to the jump in economic prosperity.
    — Alejandro Antonio Chafuen, Forbes, 23 Dec. 2024
  • The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home.
    — Arash Azizi, The Atlantic, 19 Mar. 2025
  • During the Enlightenment, reason was widely considered a better guiding force than the senses or the emotions.
    — Shayla Love, The Atlantic, 25 Oct. 2024
  • But the Enlightenment, by way of John Locke, made illustrations more acceptable in the classroom.
    — JSTOR Daily, 24 June 2024
  • But rather the Enlightenment approach—incentivizing the smartest members of civilization to keep an eye on each other, on our behalf.
    — WIRED, 6 July 2023
  • The secular mindset that emerged from the Enlightenment — the belief that religion would fade while science delivered heaven on earth — has failed.
    — Mike Woodruff, Chicago Tribune, 28 Mar. 2025
  • Not only were they tied to the Enlightenment, in that they were said to provide equal opportunities to their initiates, but their elections embodied the ideals of the era.
    — Sam Walters, Discover Magazine, 13 June 2024
  • That’s important because before the Enlightenment, few people recognized even the brainy basics.
    — Kevin Dickinson, Big Think, 19 Sep. 2025
  • At the same time, arithmetic became central to the educational ambitions of the Enlightenment.
    — James Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 Dec. 2024
  • One of them is the Enlightenment on horseback, and the other is the absolute opposition to the Enlightenment.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 25 Mar. 2026
  • So hoped some intellectuals during the Enlightenment who saw the nation as a carrier of a universalist spirit.
    — Foreign Affairs, 25 Feb. 2025
  • Even at the height of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when waves took up much of the scientific discourse, the ocean always seemed to have the last word.
    — Joseph Howlett, Quanta Magazine, 15 Oct. 2025
  • Whereas Eliot knows enough about the Enlightenment’s major and minor figures, for instance, to deftly parody the bumbling uncle who has read them but shallowly.
    — Daniel Foster, National Review, 30 Nov. 2023
  • That shift was conceived and realized with the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution.
    — Martin Wolf, Foreign Affairs, 1 July 2015
  • The midwife’s hand was a gender-bending invention of the Enlightenment, combining the intelligence and strength of a man’s touch with the sensitive delicacy of a woman’s.
    — Literary Hub, 16 June 2026
  • Since the Enlightenment, science has often been seen as being in a fundamental conflict with religion and spirituality.
    — Arianna Huffington, TIME, 11 Dec. 2024
  • Xiao used the term romanticism to describe the belief, inspired by the Enlightenment, that humanity can design ideal societies through reason.
    — Chang Che, The New Yorker, 21 Dec. 2024
  • Before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages were a time of 'darkness' and insecurity.
    — Maggie Gillette, Better Homes & Gardens, 13 Mar. 2025
  • Both were steeped in the science and political philosophy of the Enlightenment, and in the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans.
    — Literary Hub, 13 May 2026
  • What’s more, Germany was the seat of the Enlightenment, a capital of European culture, and the home of more than 30 Nobel laureates.
    — Luke Berryman, New York Daily News, 27 Feb. 2025
  • That vengeful justification yielded during the Enlightenment, during a broader societal conversion to an age of reason.
    — Paul Rosenzweig, The Atlantic, 3 Jan. 2026
  • There is an old assumption that belief in magic faded away in the Enlightenment, shepherding a new age dominated by rational decision-making and scientific progress.
    — Tabitha Stanmore, TIME, 24 May 2024
  • That foundation began to slowly crumble with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but kept drawing on these eternal truths.
    — Arianna Huffington, Time, 23 Nov. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'the Enlightenment.' 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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