Sightlessness comes from sightless (sight plus the privative -less) plus -ness; sight is from Old English gesiht ('thing seen, faculty of seeing'), from the root of seon ('to see'). The historical chain includes Old English gesiht and Old English seon. Older glosses in the chain include "thing seen, faculty of seeing" and "to see", which help explain the semantic range of the modern word. Morphologically, sightlessness is best read as borrowing, yielding an English noun shaped by both form history and later usage. In current English it functions as a noun, with the sense "the state of being unable to see; blindness". related forms include sightless, sight, and see. The result is an English noun whose etymology preserves the older forms while supporting the word's specialized modern meaning.