How to Use unenlightened in a Sentence

unenlightened

adjective
  • And then there are the poor, unenlightened souls who insist on eating their pie warm.
    — Paul Cappiello, The Courier-Journal, 16 Sep. 2022
  • Chazelle loves movies and doesn’t seem to hold it against the industry that its early days were so … unenlightened.
    — Peter Debruge, Variety, 16 Dec. 2022
  • Instead of following his gut like some unenlightened pleb, Patrick trusts his spleen and his spleen alone.
    — Laura Bradley, Vulture, 13 Aug. 2025
  • And the culprit doesn’t seem to be a small number of unenlightened appraisers.
    — Tribune News Service, The Mercury News, 8 July 2024
  • Some facets of the map’s 1950s world view seem unenlightened today.
    — National Geographic, 21 Dec. 2017
  • There is a different pathos to characters who die mad and unenlightened.
    — New York Times, 10 May 2018
  • Back in more unenlightened times, husbands returning from a long-haul flight would bring their wives the latest boutique item.
    — Silvia Marchetti, CNN, 28 Aug. 2021
  • Brodie has been assailed for his unenlightened attitudes about women.
    — Janet Maslin, New York Times, 17 June 2019
  • Using one disease to combat another does not seem so outlandish, so unenlightened, in this light.
    — Rebecca Kreston, Discover Magazine, 31 May 2014
  • The British media often covered the biracial Meghan in ways which were, to say the least, unenlightened.
    — Clark Collis, EW.com, 8 Dec. 2022
  • Carell plays Riggs more as an affable, unenlightened boob than a villainous creep.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, SI.com, 22 Sep. 2017
  • It’s sometimes shown as a punishment, or a means of control — right up there with the lobotomy as a medical practice best left in the unenlightened past.
    — Kate Golembiewski, Discover Magazine, 15 Dec. 2022
  • Mitchell, who spent much time and energy while living here fighting for racial justice and attempting to enlighten the unenlightened, liked the tweet.
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 3 Nov. 2022
  • Much of the American public viewed this hesitancy as a relic of a bygone, unenlightened age.
    — Jordan E. Taylor, Time, 5 Apr. 2021
  • Two unhappy souls, having had the misfortune to be born in an unenlightened age, will take comfort in each other’s arms, in a rousing rebuke to the social code of their times.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 6 Nov. 2020
  • By today’s standards, looking for a single ideal of beauty feels antiquated and unenlightened.
    — Rhonda Garelick, New York Times, 17 Jan. 2023
  • Mallu spent the nineteen-thirties trying to speed up history by exiling the unenlightened from positions of power.
    — Bathsheba Demuth, The New Yorker, 15 Aug. 2019
  • Apparently there are still some unenlightened humans out there who make fun of e-bikes, just like certain close-minded folks once made fun of snowboarders or people who wore fanny packs or rode bikes in jean shorts.
    — Krista Langlois, Outside Online, 17 Oct. 2022
  • As infections and death tolls rise exponentially, so will the pressure on unenlightened despots to demonstrate their power over people’s freedoms of movement.
    — Adam Weinstein, The New Republic, 17 Mar. 2020
  • Instagram does not necessarily have people picking out posts and banning them, but their algorithms are trained on datasets many suspect to be biased and unenlightened.
    — Annie Brown, Forbes, 19 Oct. 2021
  • But while the unenlightened are still debating whether women over 50 should be allowed to wear miniskirts, nothing short of a fashion revolution has been taking place on the red carpet.
    — Harper's BAZAAR, 30 Apr. 2018
  • When a country like Syria is engulfed in a civil war, it’s treated as tragic, but inevitable—just the same savagery that’s constantly happening in an unenlightened part world.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 2 Mar. 2022
  • The researchers were inspired by the behavior of its close relative, germanium, which is similarly unenlightened.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 11 Apr. 2020
  • Harbaugh, for the unenlightened, hasn’t produced a depth chart for public consumption in his first five seasons coaching his alma mater and isn’t likely to do so when the Big Ten joins fall football next month.
    — Eric Hansen, The Indianapolis Star, 22 Sep. 2020
  • Her character dealt with sexism (an unenlightened male staff), single parenthood (11-year-old Helen Hunt played her daughter) and the usual amount of crime.
    — New York Times, 25 Mar. 2021
  • Regarding the rugby itself, Carter presents the game as is, without much guidance for the unenlightened, though anyone familiar with American football will get the gist.
    — Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times, 19 Jan. 2023
  • Bella acts as an audience proxy, overwhelmed by all the cultural differences and resistant to join a community that sees her as a helpless, unenlightened Earther.
    — Joshua Alston, Variety, 6 July 2022
  • Implicit in the idea is that some elite group—whether neuroscientists, corporate executives, or policymakers—would claim to know some moral truth and then issue rules for the unenlightened to follow.
    — Vanessa Rampton, Slate Magazine, 20 Mar. 2017
  • In the bleak moral universe of the show, the powerless are ground up into a paste by grifters sporting the patina of legitimacy that only bottomless cash, connections, and unenlightened self-interest can provide.
    — David Faris, The Week, 29 Apr. 2022
  • At the same time, a hairy Marxist academic who's been hanging around the factory tries to persuade the workers to collectivize and run the place themselves, a notion that soon collides with their unenlightened self-interest.
    — Chicago Reader, 7 Mar. 2018

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