know

UK/nəʊ/US/noʊ/

verbA13 meanings One of the most common words in English · #3 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: known, knew, knows

To know something is to have it in your head as a fact, with no working out and no looking it up. You know your own phone number, you know the way home, you know she is coming on Tuesday.

Know also covers being familiar with a person or a place: I know her from work, I know Berlin quite well. Many languages use two different verbs there, so watch the tense trap — not I know him since 2019 but I have known him since 2019. It is irregular: know, knew, known, and the k is silent. Useful patterns are know about, know of, and get to know someone. One rule that catches people out: know does not take -ing for the state itself, so never I am knowing the answer.

Definitions of know

1verbknowTo have information or a fact in your mind.A1~78%
“I know the answer to that one.”
2verbfamiliarTo be familiar with a person, place or thing.A1~20%
“She has known him since school.”
3verblearnedTo have learned a skill or subject well enough to use it.A1~2%
“He knows enough Spanish to order dinner and argue about the bill.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

as far as I know — Judging by what I have been told, though I may not have the whole story.
know better — To have enough sense or experience not to do something.
you never know — it might still happen, said to keep a small hope open

Where it comes from

Know goes back through Middle English knowen to Old English cnawan, which meant to know, to perceive, to recognise. Behind that lie Proto-Germanic kneana and the Proto-Indo-European root gneh-, to know. The k was pronounced once, and English kept the letter long after it stopped saying it.

Proto-Indo-European
*ǵneh₃- — to know
Proto-Germanic
*knēaną — to know
Proto-West Germanic
*knāan
Old English
cnāwan — to know, perceive, recognise
Middle English
knowen
English, today
know

From Middle English knowen, from Old English cnāwan (“to know, perceive, recognise”), from Proto-West Germanic knāan, from Proto-Germanic knēaną (“to know”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵneh₃- (“to know”). 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Everyday Verbs

Practise this word

know in the wild

But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
I know it when I see it
Stewart's "I know it when I see it" standard was praised as "realistic and gallant" and an example of candor.
I know it when I see it
During this period the person may not know that they are HIV-positive, yet they will be able to pass on the virus.
HIV/AIDS
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
There are unknown unknowns
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter.
1885 in literature

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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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the cnāwan family

know

know — used about 2 times on every page · #3 · point at the bar for the others

Definitions of know

1verbknowTo have information or a fact in your mind.A1~78%

“I know the answer to that one.”

2verbfamiliarTo be familiar with a person, place or thing.A1~20%

“She has known him since school.”

3verblearnedTo have learned a skill or subject well enough to use it.A1~2%

“He knows enough Spanish to order dinner and argue about the bill.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.