From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
benight \be*night"\ (b[-e]*n[imac]t"), verb (used with an object) [imp. & p. p. {Benighted}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Benighting}.]
1. To involve in darkness; to shroud with the shades of night; to obscure. [Archaic]
The clouds benight the sky. --Garth.
2. To overtake with night or darkness, especially before the end of a day's journey or task.
Some virgin, sure, . . . benighted in these woods. --Milton.
3. To involve in moral darkness, or ignorance; to debar from intellectual light.
Shall we to men benighted The lamp of life deny ? --Heber.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
adjective
1: overtaken by night or darkness; "benighted (or nighted) travelers hurrying toward home" [syn: {nighted}]
2: lacking enlightenment or knowledge or culture; "this benighted country"; "benighted ages of barbarism and superstition"; "the dark ages"; "a dark age in the history of education" [syn: {dark}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
39 Moby Thesaurus words for "benighted": ableptical, amaurotic, backward, bereft of light, blind, color-blind, dark, dim-sighted, empty-headed, eyeless, hemeralopic, ignorant, illiterate, in darkness, in the dark, know-nothing, mind-blind, naive, night-overtaken, nyctalopic, rayless, sightless, spiritually blind, stark blind, stone-blind, undiscerning, uneducated, unenlightened, uninformed, uninstructed, unlettered, unobserving, unperceiving, unprogressive, unschooled, unseeing, untaught, untutored, visionless
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Let's see what we can do if we put our heads together.
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