Blight

How to spell blight

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce blight

What does blight mean?

1. nounA disease that withers plants, or anything that spoils or ruins something otherwise healthy or thriving.
2. verbTo spoil, ruin, or have a severely damaging effect on something.

Blight in a sentence

• noun

  The potato blight destroyed most of the harvest that autumn.

• verb

  A single bad decision can blight an otherwise promising career.

• noun

  Years of neglect left the high street with an air of blight.

• verb

  Frost can blight the young seedlings before they take root.

Where does blight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Blight is one of those words whose deep history is genuinely murky, which is why dictionaries hedge when they trace it. It surfaces in English around the start of the 1600s, first as a farming and gardening term for a sudden disease that withers crops, fruit trees, and grain, seemingly overnight. The most likely link is to Old English words for a pale or sickly colour, such as blæce and blæcðu, which described scaly skin conditions and a general unhealthy pallor; the idea of something turning sickly and discoloured fits the agricultural sense well. From the literal plant disease, the meaning widened during the 1800s to cover anything that spoils or ruins, giving us phrases like urban blight for decayed city areas. Because the spelling keeps the silent, historical -gh- cluster that English never quite let go of, blight rhymes with light and sight rather than being written the way it sounds. The honest position is that the precise origin is uncertain, so the connection to those pale-skin words remains the best guess rather than a settled fact.

How the word is built

• blight (a single Old English root word, with no prefix or suffix)