enlightenment

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   the gaining or giving of knowledge and clearer understanding

   Travel brought her enlightenment about customs she had once misunderstood.

2. 2
   noun

   in several religious and philosophical traditions, a state of profound spiritual insight or liberation

   The monk devoted his life to the pursuit of enlightenment.

3. 3
   noun

   the Enlightenment: an eighteenth-century European intellectual movement emphasizing reason and individual inquiry

   Enlightenment thinkers challenged inherited political and religious authority.

Formed from enlighten + -ment. The general sense is "the act or state of giving light or understanding"; spiritual traditions and the historical Enlightenment developed specialized uses of that metaphor.

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