Other forms: forgotten, forgot, forgetting, forgets
To forget is to lose out of your mind something you had in it before. A name that goes the moment you need it, the keys still lying on the kitchen table, a friend's birthday remembered two days late.
Two patterns follow it and they mean opposite things: forget to lock the door means the door is open, while forget locking the door means you locked it and have no memory of doing it. Forget about it drops a subject, and forget it, said sharply, refuses one. The past forms are irregular, forgot and forgotten, and forgetful is the adjective for a person whose memory keeps slipping. The small blue flower called forget-me-not is named after the plea, and English keeps forgive and forget in one breath.
1verbforgetTo fail to remember something you knew.
“I always forget which platform the fast train leaves from.”
2verbslippedTo fail to do something because it slipped your mind.
“Do not forget to water the plants while we are away.”
3verbbehindTo leave something behind by mistake.
“He forgets his umbrella in every cafe in town.”
4verbstopTo stop thinking about someone or something on purpose.
“She wanted to forget the whole year.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Forget is for- plus get, from Old English forgietan, and behind it a Proto-West Germanic word fragetan that already meant to give up or to forget. Old Norse geta, to get or to guess, leaned on the English word as it took shape. Read the parts and forgetting is failing to get hold of something.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰed-
Proto-West Germanic
*fragetan — to give up, forget
Old English
forġietan — to forget
Middle English
forgeten
English, today
forget
From Middle English forgeten, forgiten, foryeten, forȝiten, from Old English forġietan (“to forget”) [influenced by Old Norse geta ("to get, to guess")], from Proto-West Germanic fragetan (“to give up, forget”). Equivalent to for- + get. Cognate with:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA