Forget
/fərˈɡɛt/noun
To fail to remember or to fail to keep in mind.
Did you know?Forget comes from Old English forgietan, where the prefix for- intensifies the sense of total loss, and its deep Germanic relatives show that forgetting was once imagined as a kind of mental abandonment.
Etymological Timeline
Proto-Indo-European
PIE
*gʰed-
“to seize, take, hold”
Proto-Germanic
PGmc
*forgetaną
“to lose from memory, fail to keep”
Old English
English
forgietan
“to forget, neglect, omit”
Middle English
English
forgeten
“to forget”
Modern English
English
forget
“to fail to remember”