Acquaintance

How to spell acquaintance

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce acquaintance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acquaintance mean?

1. nounA person one knows slightly but who is not a close friend.
2. nounPersonal knowledge of or familiarity with a subject, place, or thing.

Acquaintance in a sentence

• He was only a casual acquaintance from her old workplace.

• The job requires a working acquaintance with several accounting programs.

• The lawyer turned out to be a former acquaintance of mine from university.

• Her close acquaintance with local tax law made the audit straightforward.

Where does acquaintance come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from the Old French acointance, a noun built on the verb acointier, meaning 'to make known' or 'to make familiar'. That verb descended from the Late Latin accognitare, ultimately rooted in the Latin cognoscere, which literally meant 'to get to know' or 'to recognise', itself formed from com- ('with', 'thoroughly') and the old verb gnoscere ('to know'). English took the word on in the 1300s, first carrying the sense of personal knowledge or familiarity, and only later settling on the modern meaning of a person one knows slightly. The same gnoscere root sits behind a whole family of English words, including 'recognise', 'cognition', and 'incognito'. The spelling trap lives in that silent, easily forgotten 'c' before the 'q', a relic of the Latin prefix that no longer announces itself when the word is spoken.

How the word is built

• ac- (variant of ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward')
• quaint (root from Latin cognoscere, 'to know')
• -ance (noun suffix forming a state or thing)