Word.ws English Dictionary

prior knowledge

prior knowledge noun: knowledge of a set of circumstances sufficient to make actions based on those circumstances wrongful.

Noun

prior knowledge (uncountable)

  1. (criminal law) Knowledge of a set of circumstances sufficient to make actions based on those circumstances wrongful.
    • The defendant was convicted because the prosecutor proved the defendant's prior knowledge of the victim's particular vulnerability.
  2. Prior to the inception of an insurance policy, knowledge of specific extant circumstances that could reasonably give rise to a claim under that policy.
    • All our policies require a declaration of no prior knowledge as a matter of routine.
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see prior, knowledge.
    • I had no prior knowledge of linguistics, but that didn't stop me from writing a dictionary.
    • The impact of prior knowledge on the acquisition of knowledge is certanly not a new finding.1995, Jan Elen, Blocks on the Road to Instructional Design Prescriptions, →ISBN, page 217

Questions about prior knowledge

What does prior knowledge mean?
Prior knowledge means knowledge of a set of circumstances sufficient to make actions based on those circumstances wrongful.
What part of speech is prior knowledge?
Prior knowledge is a noun.

Words near prior knowledge in the dictionary

  1. prior
  2. prior art
  3. prior authorization
  4. prior claustral
  5. prior conventual
  6. prior knowledge
  7. prior probabilities
  8. prior probability
  9. prior restraint
  10. prior restraints
  11. prior to

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prior knowledge (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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