nescience

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The Word of the Day for November 12 is:

nescience   \NESH-ee-unss\   noun 
     : lack of knowledge or awareness : ignorance 

Example sentence: 
     As the conversation among the group turned to movies, Rob feared that his 
silence might betray his nescience toward all things related to the cinema.

Did you know? 
     Eighteenth-century British poet, essayist, and lexicographer Samuel 
Johnson once said, "There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would 
not rather know it than not know it." He undoubtedly knew a thing or two about 
the history of the word "nescience," which evolved from a combination of the 
Latin prefix "ne-," meaning "not," and "scire," a verb meaning "to know," and 
which first appeared in English in the early 17th century. And Johnson probably 
also knew that "scire" is also an ancestor of "science," a word whose original 
meaning in English was "knowledge." From that point, it takes no stretch of the 
imagination to see that "scire" also gave us other words relating to the mind, 
including "conscience," "conscious," and "prescience."