Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

amnesia

UK/æmˈniːʒə/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,289 of 15,258neutral

Amnesia is loss of memory, through injury or illness. Suffer amnesia, temporary amnesia, complete amnesia.

Real cases rarely look like the film version: people usually lose the ability to form new memories rather than their whole identity. Retrograde amnesia loses the past and anterograde amnesia loses the future. Note the Greek, meaning forgetfulness.

Dinosaurchicken03 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of amnesia

  1. 1nounamnesiaLoss of memory through injury or illness.B2

    “After the accident, he had amnesia and couldn't remember anything about that day.”

amnesia is a condition.

Where it comes from

Greek amnesia means forgetfulness, from a-, not, plus mimneskein, to remember. Amnesty comes from the same forgetting.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *men- (think)

  2. Ancient Greek

    ἀμνησία — forgetfulness

  3. Latin

    amnesia

  4. English, today

    amnesia

Built from

  • μιμνήσκω · Ancient Greek — to remind, to remember

From modified Latin amnesia, from Ancient Greek ἀμνησία (“forgetfulness”), a noun derivation from μιμνήσκω (“to remind, to remember”) prefixed with the alpha privative.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Thinking & Memory

Practise this word

amnesia in the wild

  • In people with amnesia, the ability to recall immediate information is still retained, and they may still be able to form new memories.

    Amnesia

  • Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories (memories of situations or events) before the age of three to four years.

    Childhood amnesia

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.