enlightenment

• enlightment (rare)

From enlighten +‎ -ment.

• IPA^(key): /ɪnˈlaɪtənmənt/, /ənˈlaɪtənmənt/, /-laɪtmənt/

• Audio (Southern England)

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enlightenment (usually uncountable, plural enlightenments)

1. An act of enlightening, or the state of being enlightened or instructed.
2. A concept in spirituality, philosophy and psychology related to achieving clarity of perception, reason and knowledge.
   • 1893, Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics:

     But the man who has attained enlightenment sees that the apparent reality is mere illusion, or, as was said a couple of thousand years later, that there is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

   • 2014 July 31, Oliver C. Speck, editor, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema‎, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 25:

     Thus Django becomes the carrier of the “public use of one's reason”—the Kantian road to enlightenment given to him by the German “Forty-Eighter” dentist–turned-bounty hunter Dr. “King” Schultz, and represents the fictive, allohistorical beginning of the battle against slavery and racism in the United States.

• epiphany
• peace that passeth understanding
• satori, zen

• “enlightenment”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• enlightenment in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• “enlightenment”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.