Blinded

How to spell blinded

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce blinded

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does blinded mean?

1. verbPast tense of blind: made someone temporarily or permanently unable to see.
2. verbPast tense of blind: caused someone to lose the ability to judge clearly.

Blinded in a sentence

• The oncoming headlights briefly blinded the driver on the motorway.

• His loyalty to the firm blinded him to the obvious accounting errors.

• The welder wore a mask so the bright arc never blinded him.

• Greed blinded the investors to the warning signs in the report.

Where does blinded come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and participle of the verb 'blind', which descends directly from the Old English 'blind', an adjective meaning 'sightless' or 'dark'. It shares roots across the Germanic languages, appearing as 'blind' in Old Norse, Dutch, and German, and scholars trace it to a Proto-Germanic form 'blindaz', which carried the broader sense of 'clouded' or 'confused' as much as physically sightless. The verb use, meaning 'to deprive of sight', grew naturally out of the adjective, and the figurative sense of clouding someone's judgement was well established by the medieval period. The spelling has stayed remarkably steady over the centuries, and the only mild trap in 'blinded' is the doubled vowel sound around the silent ending; the word is simply 'blind' with a regular '-ed' added, so there is no consonant doubling to worry about.

How the word is built

• blind (Old English: unable to see)
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)