Enlightenment

How to spell enlightenment

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce enlightenment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does enlightenment mean?

1. nounThe state of gaining clear knowledge, insight, or understanding about something previously misunderstood.
2. nounIn Buddhist and related traditions, a state of profound spiritual insight and release from ignorance.

Enlightenment in a sentence

• The training session brought a moment of real enlightenment about the new accounting rules.

• The monk spent decades meditating in pursuit of enlightenment.

• Reading the manual cover to cover finally gave her the enlightenment she needed to fix the printer.

• The teacher explained that enlightenment frees a person from craving and suffering.

Where does enlightenment come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English construction built on the very old word 'light', which descends from Old English 'leoht', meaning brightness or illumination, a word shared with German 'Licht' and Dutch 'licht'. The verb 'enlighten' was assembled in Middle English by adding the prefix 'en-', meaning 'to bring into a condition', so the literal idea was 'to fill with light'. From the physical sense of shining a lamp on something, the meaning shifted to the figurative: to fill the mind with understanding, to remove the darkness of ignorance. The noun 'enlightenment' followed, capped with the suffix '-ment', which English borrowed from French and Latin to turn verbs into nouns naming a result or state. By the eighteenth century the word had become the name for an entire intellectual movement that prized reason, and the spelling trap lives in the quiet middle, where the unstressed '-ten-' can easily be dropped.

How the word is built

• en- (to bring into a state)
• light (root: brightness, illumination)
• -en (verb-forming suffix)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)