Word.ws English Dictionary

unknow

unknow verb: to undo the process of knowing; to lose knowledge of something.

Verb

unknow (third-person singular simple present unknows, present participle unknowing, simple past unknew, past participle unknown)

  1. To undo the process of knowing; to lose knowledge of something.
    • To awaken the conscious self to the principle of the whole or Tao one needs to forget oneself, so that in knowing one unknows.2004, William Joseph Jackson, Heaven's fractal net: retrieving lost visions in the humanities: Volume 1, page 205
    • You clearly care about this employee’s well-being and want to be supportive. Even though you can’t unknow what you saw on TikTok, this is not your problem to solve.2023 February 3, Roxane Gay, “My Co-Worker’s Baby Photo Gallery Put Me Over the Edge”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    Synonyms:
    unlearn

Synonyms of unknow

Forms of unknow

third-person singular presentunknows
present participleunknowing
pastunknew
past participleunknown

Origin of unknow

From un- + know.

Questions about unknow

What does unknow mean?
Unknow means to undo the process of knowing; to lose knowledge of something.
What part of speech is unknow?
Unknow is a verb.
What is the past tense of unknow?
The past tense of unknow is unknew.

Words near unknow in the dictionary

  1. unknotted
  2. unknottedness
  3. unknotting
  4. unknottings
  5. unknotty
  6. unknow
  7. unknowabilities
  8. unknowability
  9. unknowable
  10. unknowableness
  11. unknowables

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unknow (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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Cite this entry: “unknow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unknow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.