Daily Vocabulary

blight: something that impairs growth, withers hopes and ambitions or impedes progress and prosperity. Urban blight is one such thing we speak of: when a city is decayed due to infrastructure problems for instance, or due to poor governance or high crime rates. Plants get blights of various sorts all the time, and entire books are devoted to trying to get rid of them. Sometimes people or peoples are referred to as blights as well, because they're noxious or annoying. Whatever the blight is, though, I'm really very fond of this definition. "Withers hopes and ambitions" is the key phrase for me. Withers hopes. A rather poetical and metaphorical phrase for a definition, taken in this case from the American Heritage Dictionary. Someone at the AmHer slipped a nice turn of phrase in here and there. It's delightful to me.