Forgietan

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Old English verb meaning to lose remembrance of something or someone ; to disregard or neglect a duty, person, or thing
2. To let knowledge or memory of something slip away from the mind ; to fail to attend to or take care of something owed
3. Lose the memory of a thing once known ; to pass over or neglect something through carelessness or oversight

Etymology: Forgietan was an Old English verb meaning "to forget," built from the prefix "for-", which carried a sense of loss or negation (as in "forgo" and "forsake"), and "gietan," meaning "to get" or "to grasp." Put together, the word literally meant something like "to lose the grasp of" or "to get away from" a thing held in the mind, so forgetting was imagined as a failure to keep hold of something. The Old English form survives in the modern verb through a series of changes. The "-ietan" ending wore down over the centuries, and "forget" appears in Middle English texts from roughly the 12th to 13th centuries in forms much closer to its current shape. The word also had close relatives in other Germanic languages, such as Old Saxon "fargezan" and Old High German "firgezzan," which show the same pattern of a negating prefix attached to a "get"-type root.