Recognise

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /ˈɹɛkənaɪz/

Definitions

1. To identify someone or something as previously known or familiar ; to accept or admit the truth, validity, or legality of something
2. To perceive and acknowledge a person, object, or fact as familiar or established ; to formally accept or approve the authority or existence of an idea or entity
3. To recognize the identity or status of a person or thing being encountered again ; to concede or agree to the existence, validity, or legality of a claim, rule, or institution

Etymology: The verb's core is a simple compound: Latin "recognoscere" joined "re-", meaning "again", to "cognoscere", meaning "to know" or "to get to know". To recognise something was, at root, to know it again, to re-cognise it from an earlier encounter. The sense of matching a present thing to a past memory is built into the prefix itself. The word reached English through Middle French "reconoistre" and Old French "reconoistre", both descended from that Latin verb. Its arrival in the 16th century mattered, because it displaced an older native English verb, "acknow", which meant much the same thing. English thus swapped a Germanic word for a Latin-derived one, a pattern common in the period, though "acknow" itself has since vanished. The Latin verb also had a rare, separate relative, "recognizare", meaning "to try by jury", a legal sense that never became the ordinary English meaning. The everyday sense of identifying something as already known is the one that stuck.

Synonyms: identify, acknowledge, realize, discern, distinguish

Antonyms: ignore, overlook, disregard, miss, neglect