nescience: M-W's Word of the Day

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The Word of the Day for November 12 is:

nescience \NESH-ee-unss\ noun
: lack of knowledge or awareness : ignorance

Example sentence:
As the conversation among the group turned to movies, Rob feared that his silence might betray his nescience toward all things related to the cinema.

Did you know?
Eighteenth-century British poet, essayist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson once said, "There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it." He undoubtedly knew a thing or two about the history of the word "nescience," which evolved from a combination of the Latin prefix "ne-," meaning "not," and "scire," a verb meaning "to know," and which first appeared in English in the early 17th century. And Johnson probably also knew that "scire" is also an ancestor of "science," a word whose original meaning in English was "knowledge." From that point, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see that "scire" also gave us other words relating to the mind, including "conscience," "conscious," and "prescience."

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