1A plant disease, especially one caused by fungi such as mildews, rusts, and smuts.

1. 1.1in singular A thing that spoils or damages something.
   her remorse could be a blight on that happiness

   Example sentencesExamples

   • This city of sinners has been a blight upon the land for too long.
   • The whispers have been there for a while, that the Montreal Expos, who for a three-game series in September drew only 8,817 fans in total, and one of the Florida teams were financial disasters, blights on the game.
   • It is clear the politicians and health experts are struggling to find a strategy for coping with what is one of the great blights of modern life.
   • However, South Africa sees mercenaries as one of the blights on Africa.
   • He has been credited with turning the country around after several severe economic blights and in recent years for spearheading the introduction of policies to boost the country's economic competitiveness.
   • From the house, the sea can just be glimpsed through a chink at the end of the valley, but its secluded location means no traffic noise and no views of cranes and advertising hoardings, the blights of the Costa.
   • It was previously believed world-wide that those suffering from these more mysterious blights of the mind were possessed by the devil or a demon counterpart.
   • The video quality is very good, with no detracting edge enhancement or digital blights.
   • Other than an awareness of the blight at school headquarters, there is no evidence that these businessmen/reformers have a clue about what is really wrong with schooling.
   • The request came at the half-way point in Manchester's pioneering campaign to rid itself of litter, graffiti and other environmental blights in just 100 days.
   • Obvious blights on the Fascist record - the racial laws of 1938, the roundup of Jews in October 1943 - will be minimized or passed over in silence.
   • The Redskins and Orioles have been ruined by the blights of modern sports: unsentimentality, overreliance on free agents, and obnoxious rich owners.
   • There's David Childs, whom Filler credits with having created ‘some of the worst blights on the city's skyline in recent decades’.
   • In the next two decades, there will take place a total discrediting of these monstrous blights on the economic stability and prosperity of our civilization.
   • Most of the anachronistic blights on the conscience of humanity like bear baiting, cock fighting, dog fighting have long been illegal.
   • Carlyle and Heworth have struggled this season with injury blights having a major impact on performance and significantly reducing numbers to the extent that the ‘A’ team was almost axed last month.
   • She refers to Aviemore as a diseased blight whose continuing existence diminishes Scotland.
   • Nowadays, anyone with access to graphics software can readily modify digital images to remove such blights as red eye in flash photos or transport themselves from a crowded room to a pristine beach.
   • There are other irritating blights of the Internet age, like spam.
   • Fascism is a gross deformity on the once awe inspiringly superlative face of this earth, and such blights so easily make otherwise beautiful spectacles the ugliest of things.

   Synonyms

   affliction, scourge, bane, curse, plague, menace, evil, misfortune, woe, calamity, trouble, ordeal, thorn in one's flesh, thorn in one's side, trial, tribulation, visitation, nuisance, pest, pollution, contamination, cancer, canker
2. 1.2 An ugly, neglected, or rundown condition of an urban area.
   the depressing urban blight that lies to the south of the city

   Example sentencesExamples

   • The Harlem of 1921 was already an urban blight, although only a few years separated these once fine homes from the mansions and townhouses of upper crust New York in those days.
   • The result is that intercultural and intergroup dialogue is always difficult, and widespread misunderstanding adds to the blight of the overall area.
   • A leafy neighbourhood of detached and semi-detached homes much removed from the urban blight of Scottish cities.
   • Glasgow's high-rise social housing had become synonymous with urban blight and social deprivation.
   • Urban blight and flight is transformed into bustle, bounty, and bidding wars.
   • The barren South Bronx neighborhood that Ronald Reagan visited in 1980 to illustrate urban blight is now a thriving area, with, inevitably, a Starbucks.
   • Urban blight is cumulative and self-reinforcing; blighted buildings cast a pall on land around them, discourage upkeep, and stifle renewal.
   • I was enchanted with Troy when I was growing up, but as an adult I thought I wanted no part of urban blight - until I realized that I couldn't afford the country.
   • However, the figures are still dwarfed by the huge scale of the problem of urban dereliction and blight in the area.
   • Even then, local governments didn't have carte blanche; they had to justify the taking as a way to mitigate ‘urban blight.’
   • The spray-painted art was considered an urban blight by New York officials, who persecuted the young artists who created it.
   • Pompeii is an hour's drive away: up over the Chiunzi pass, down through the urban blight of the Sarno plain, and there it is, the world's most famous stopped clock.
   • But Pine-Parc was only one of several blights to hit the Milton-Parc neighbourhood (now better known as the McGill ghetto).
   • On a street pocked with dark storefronts, and in a neighborhood with its share of urban blight, the Beachland's neon sign is a beacon.
   • I feel duty bound to respond to the marchers who trooped through the capital the other day, bringing the wonderful sights and sounds, and the less wonderful smells, of the country to my patch of urban blight yesterday.
   • The rubbish has been accumulating at the site over the past few weeks and now has grown into dreadful blights on the roadside.
   • A council spokesman said: ‘This is an area that was a blight on the landscape.’
   • The setting becomes an urban blight, with the Romans as jackbooted thugs and the Jewish leaders dressing suspiciously like the aliens in Dark City, and Judas as a singing James Dean.
   • Instead, it declined precipitously, becoming by the 1990s one of the country's poorest cities and a national symbol of urban blight.
   • Sullum makes a good case that urban blight should instead be addressed under the government's police power, which includes the authority to force property owners to eliminate nuisances.

1Have a severely detrimental effect on.

2Infect (plants) with blight.