pseudoenlightenment

noun

False enlightenment.

Scrabble 28

Meanings

nounpseudoenlightenment (countable and uncountable, plural pseudoenlightenments)

plural pseudoenlightenments

  1. countableuncountableFalse enlightenment.

    One such audience member, catching a ray of pseudoenlightenment, realizes that watching a woman bash people to death for three years has turned him into "a feminist."

    2023 April 28, Giri Nathan, “Book Review: 'Chain-Gang All-Stars,' by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 28 Apr 2023
    2 more examples

    [T]he social construct of the good life is manifest in these works—an urban American vision framed by the achievements of commerce and of the new pluralist pseudoenlightenment of equal opportunity.

    1984, Hal Himmelstein, Television Myth and the American Mind, New York, N.Y. […]: Praeger Publishers, →ISBN, page 114

    His culminating vision is a pseudoenlightenment, contaminated by his unaltered egoism: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity" (35; emphasis mine).

    1991, Thomas Jackson Rice, “The Geometry of Meaning in Dubliners: A Euclidian Approach”, in Style, volume 25, number 1, DeKalb, I.L.: Northern Illinois University, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 397

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

pseudoenlightenment. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pseudoenlightenment

MLA

“pseudoenlightenment.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pseudoenlightenment. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “pseudoenlightenment,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pseudoenlightenment.

Source: pseudoenlightenment on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.