Library / English Dictionary

BLINDNESS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

The state of being blind or lacking sight

Synonyms:

blindness; cecity; sightlessness

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Hypernyms ("blindness" is a kind of...):

vision defect; visual defect; visual disorder; visual impairment (impairment of the sense of sight)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "blindness"):

legal blindness (vision that is 20/200 or worse in both eyes (20/200 vision is the ability to see at 20 feet what a normal eye can see at 200 feet))

anopia (sightlessness (especially because of a structural defect in or the absence of an eye))

snow-blindness; snowblindness (temporary blindness caused by exposure to sunlight reflected from snow or ice)

eyelessness (blindness due to loss of the eyes)

figural blindness (inability to see shapes and contours)

Derivation:

blind (unable to see)

Credits

 Context examples: 

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness in the United States.

(Another Reason to Exercise: Protecting Your Sight, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Other serious symptoms include blood clots, blindness, and inflammation of the brain, spinal cord, and digestive system.

(Behcet disease, NCI Dictionary)

It is a leading cause of blindness in American adults.

(Diabetic Eye Problems, NIH: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases)

Signs and symptoms include dementia, cortical deafness and blindness, pseudobulbar palsy, and hemiplegia.

(Diffuse Cerebral Sclerosis of Schilder, NCI Thesaurus)

Exposure to this substance is corrosive to the eyes, skin and lungs and leads to blindness and blistering of the skin and can cause severe and sometimes fatal respiratory damage.

(Mustard Gas, NCI Thesaurus)

Signs and symptoms include irritability, mental and motor developmental disturbances, muscle weakness, seizures, blindness, and deafness.

(Krabbe Disease, NCI Thesaurus)

Signs and symptoms include abnormal gait, blindness, depression, paralysis, seizures and dementia.

(Neurosyphilis, NCI Thesaurus)

My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I had feared that the boy might receive evil from her, and had never dreamed in my blindness that she might get good from him.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Subsequently, patients develop developmental abnormalities in speech and motor skills, blindness, epilepsy, and seizures.

(Infantile Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis, NCI Thesaurus)