Know

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /nəʊ/

Definitions

1. To have familiarity or understanding of facts or concepts
2. To possess awareness or recognition of information, people, or situations; to perceive or be certain through experience or learning; to distinguish or identify something or someone
3. To hold knowledge or be acquainted with facts, ideas, or skills; to realize or comprehend through cognitive processes; to remember or acknowledge from past encounters

Etymology: Old English speakers used "cnāwan" for recognising a face or perceiving something with the senses, and only later did it come to mean holding knowledge in the mind. The word goes back to a Proto-Germanic verb, "knēaną," which descends from an Indo-European root shared by a large family of words for knowing. Latin "gnoscere" and its compound "cognoscere" belong to the same family, as do Ancient Greek "gnōsis," meaning knowledge, and Russian "znatʹ," meaning to know. The English word is therefore a close relative of the familiar Latin-derived words "cognition" and "recognise," though the two lines entered English separately. Its Germanic cousin "ken," meaning to know or to recognise, survives in Scots and in dialect speech and is a true sibling rather than a borrowing. The shortened phrase "you know," used as a filler, is an abbreviation of the fuller expression, and it reached English as a conversational habit rather than a new coinage.

Synonyms: understand, comprehend, grasp, realize, recognize

Antonyms: ignore, overlook, misunderstand, forget, disregard