Known

How to spell known

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce known

What does known mean?

1. adjectiveRecognised, familiar, or established as true, often as the past participle of the verb know.

Known in a sentence

• The restaurant is well known for its slow service.

• She has known the answer since the start of the meeting.

Where does known come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'know', which descends from the Old English cnawan, meaning 'to recognise, to be acquainted with, or to perceive'. That verb traces back to a Proto-Germanic root and ultimately to an ancient Indo-European root gno-, meaning 'to know', the same root that gives us Latin-derived words such as 'recognise', 'cognition', and even 'ignore'. The puzzling silent k at the start was once fully pronounced in Old and Middle English, so a speaker really did sound out the hard 'k' before the 'n'; the consonant cluster was gradually smoothed away in pronunciation during the 1600s, but the spelling stubbornly kept the k. That frozen, no-longer-spoken k is exactly the trap, since the word sounds simply like 'nohn'. The -own spelling of the participle mirrors related forms such as 'grown', 'thrown', and 'shown'.

How the word is built

• kn- (silent k from Old English cnāwan: to recognise)
• -own (past participle ending)