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Allin

unknown

adjectivenounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ʌn(ˈn)əʊn//
  • United States//ʌnˈnoʊn//

Not known; unidentified; not well known.

adjective

  1. 1

    Not known; unidentified; not well known.

    The Celebrity, by arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at Mohair on a certain afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the track. The three returned wondering and charmed with Mrs. Cooke; they were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious house.

    I suspect that this large and complex military railway system, shrouded in official secrecy for most of its operational life, remains unknown to many people.

Etymology

From Middle English *unknowen, *uniknowen, uniknowe, from Old English unġecnāwen (“unknown”), equivalent to un- + known.

noun

  1. 1

    A variable (usually x, y or z) whose value is to be found.

  2. 2

    Any thing, place, or situation about which nothing is known; an unknown fact or piece of information.

    Had God walked close beside her into the unknown?

    I think I learned more from my family than they did from me in the brief idyllic time we spent together. None of them much more than a mile from home, they carried the aura of a close-knit community as a shield against against the unknown.

    As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know.

    The other priority is getting people to respond well to interventions, especially changes to routine. This is one of the biggest unknowns in these scenarios, and yet compliance can be the most crucial factor in determining whether an intervention works.

  3. 3

    A person of no identity; a nonentity.

    How does it feel, / how does it feel? / To be on your own, / with no direction home / A complete unknown, / like a rolling stone

    Khaleque, the landowner, who had contributed most of the money needed to transform the neglected burial-place of an unknown into a mazar, masked his pride and pleasure with difficulty. He solemnly declared: ‘Perhaps now we shall be forgiven for neglecting the saint all these years.’

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of unknowpast participle of unknow

Forms

plural
unknowns
comparative
more unknown
superlative
most unknown
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).