blind
Definitions
General English
General Science
- adjective not responding to specific codes
Computing
- adjective not responding to certain codes
Construction
- Any panel, shade, screen, or similar contrivance used to block light or inhibit viewing.
- An assembly of wood stiles, rail and wood slats, or louvers used in conjunction with doors and windows.
Information & Library Science
- adjective done without preparation or the relevant information
Military
- noun a camouflaged screen designed to conceal a soldier or piece of equipment
- noun a missile, shell or other projectile which has been fired but has failed to explode
Real Estate
- noun a device that is pulled down to shut out the light from a window, available in various styles
Slang
- adjective unpleasant, painful. Recorded as an item of Sowetan slang in the Cape Sunday Times, 29 January 1995.
Origin & History of “blind”
The connotations of the ultimate ancestor of blind, Indo-European *bhlendhos, seem to have been not so much ‘sightlessness’ as ‘confusion’ and ‘obscurity’. The notion of someone wandering around in actual or mental darkness, not knowing where to go, naturally progressed to the ‘inability to see’. Related words that fit this pattern are blunder, possibly from Old Norse blunda ‘shut one’s eyes’, blunt, and maybe also blend. By the time the word entered Old English, as blind, it already meant ‘sightless’, but ancestral associations of darkness and obscurity were retained (Pepys in his diary, for instance, writes of a ‘little blind (that is, dark) bed-chamber’ 1666), and traces of them remain in such usages as ‘blind entrance’.
