Forgotten

How to spell forgotten

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce forgotten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does forgotten mean?

1. adjectiveNo longer remembered, recalled, or thought about.

Forgotten in a sentence

• The old recipe had been forgotten until she found it in the attic.

• His name was almost forgotten by the time the reunion was planned.

Where does forgotten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'forget', which descends from the Old English forgietan, meaning 'to lose hold of in the mind' or 'to fail to grasp'. It is built from the prefix for-, which in Old English carried a sense of loss, negation, or doing something amiss, joined to gietan, the same root that gives us the ordinary verb 'get', literally 'to grasp or seize'. So to forget was, quite vividly, to let something slip from one's mental grip; the spelling preserves that buried 'get'. The form belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close cousins in the Dutch vergeten and the German vergessen, both meaning the same thing. The doubled 't' in 'forgotten' arises because the short vowel of 'got' is followed by the -en ending, mirroring the same doubling seen in 'gotten', and that consonant doubling is the small spelling decision writers most often second-guess.

How the word is built

• for- (away, amiss, loss of)
• got (past stem of get, from Old English -gietan 'to grasp, get')
• -en (past participle suffix)