Other forms: ignored, ignoring, ignores
To ignore something is to notice it and act as though you had not. The phone buzzing on the table that you turn face down, the neighbour you walk past without saying hello, the warning light that has been on since March.
You ignore people, emails, advice, warnings, a smell coming from the fridge. The word carries a decision inside it: if you never saw the sign, you missed it, and only somebody who saw it can ignore it. The trap is the family standing next to it. Ignorant does not mean ignoring — it means not knowing, and calling a person ignorant is an insult about what is in their head. Ignorance is that same lack of knowledge, never the act, so a driver's ignorance of the rule and a driver ignoring the rule are two different court cases.
1verbdisregardTo take no notice of someone or something on purpose.~75%
“She ignored the question and carried on eating.”
2verbignoreTo refuse to act on a rule, a warning or a piece of advice.~25%
“They ignored every warning printed on the packet.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Ignore is Latin in- plus gnarus, not-knowing. The same root gives nosco, to know, and it is a cousin of English know itself. So the first ignoring was genuine blankness — you really had no idea. Modern ignoring is a performance of that blankness: you read the message perfectly well and are pretending otherwise.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵneh₃-
French
ignorer
English, today
ignore
Built from
From French ignorer. From French ignorer, from Latin ignōrō (“to have no knowledge of, mistake, take no notice of, ignore”), from ignārus (“not knowing”), from in- (“not”) + gnārus (“knowing”), from gnōscō, nōscō; see know.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA