benight (benights, present participle benighting; past and past participle benighted) (archaic, transitive)

1. To overtake with night; especially of a traveller, etc.: to be caught out by oncoming night before reach#Verb|reaching one's destination.
   • 1678, John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That which is to Come: […], London: Printed for Nath[aniel] Ponder […], OCLC 228725984 ↗; reprinted in The Pilgrim’s Progress (The Noel Douglas Replicas), London: Noel Douglas, […], 1928, OCLC 5190338 ↗, page 47 ↗:

     How far might I have been on my way by this time! I am made to tread thoſe ſteps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once: Yea now alſo I am like to be benighted, for the day is almost ſpent.

   • 1815 February 23, [Walter Scott], chapter I, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. [...] In Three Volumes, volume I, Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and Archibald Constable and Co., […], OCLC 742335644 ↗, page 4 ↗:

     The public road, however, was tolerably well-made and safe, so that the prospect of being benighted brought with it no real danger.

2. To darken; to shroud or obscure.
   • 1922 October, A[lfred] E[dward] Housman, “[Poem] XXV: The Oracles”, in Last Poems, London: Grant Richards Ltd., OCLC 31583861 ↗, stanza 4, lines 13–14, page 51 ↗:

     The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning; / Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.

3. To plunge or be overwhelmed in moral or intellectual darkness.
   • 1819, Reginald Heber, The Missionary Hymn ↗:

     Can we whose souls are lighted

     With Wisdom from on high,

     Can we to men benighted

     The lamp of life deny?

• German: umnachten
• Spanish: oscurecer