Cognitive

How to spell cognitive

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cognitive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cognitive mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the mental processes of thinking, learning, remembering, and understanding.

Cognitive in a sentence

• The therapy aims to correct unhelpful cognitive patterns.

• Lack of sleep can impair cognitive performance at work.

Where does cognitive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb cognoscere, meaning 'to get to know' or 'to recognise', formed from the prefix co- ('together' or 'thoroughly') joined to gnoscere ('to know'), an old root that also gave us 'know' itself through a shared Indo-European ancestor. The Latin past participle cognitus ('known') produced the Medieval Latin adjective cognitivus, describing anything 'capable of knowing'. English adopted cognitive in the early 1400s, at first in the narrow philosophical sense of pertaining to the act of knowing or perceiving. It largely faded from everyday use until the twentieth century, when psychology revived it to describe the mental processes of thinking, learning, and remembering. The silent g and the c that sounds soft only because of the following vowels are the chief spelling traps, both inherited straight from the Latin gnoscere root that also underlies 'recognise' and 'incognito'.

How the word is built

• co- (together)
• gn- (from gnoscere: to know)
• -itive (adjective suffix)