Recognize vs Irrecognizable - What's the difference?
recognize | irrecognizable |
To match something or someone which one currently perceives to a memory of some previous encounter with the same entity.
* 1900 , , (The House Behind the Cedars) , Chapter I,
To acknowledge the existence or legality of something; treat as valid or worthy of consideration.
To acknowledge or consider as something.
To realize or discover the nature of something; apprehend quality in; realize or admit that.
* {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=May-June, author=
, title= To give an award.
To show appreciation of.
(obsolete) To review; to examine again.
(obsolete) To reconnoiter.
To cognize again.
(archaic, rare) Unable to be recognized.Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd ed., 1989.
* 1850 , , "The Stump Orator" in Latter Day Pamphlets :
* 1902 , "
* , "The Light from Beyond" in The White Sybil and Other Stories ,
As a verb recognize
is to match something or someone which one currently perceives to a memory of some previous encounter with the same entity.As an adjective irrecognizable is
unable to be recognized.recognize
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl) reconoistre, from (etyl) recognoscere, first attested in the 16th century. Displaced native English , compare German erkennen.Alternative forms
* recognise (non-Oxford British spelling)Verb
(recogniz) (North American and Oxford British spelling)- He looked in vain into the stalls for the butcher who had sold fresh meat twice a week, on market days, and he felt a genuine thrill of pleasure when he recognized the red bandana turban of old Aunt Lyddy, the ancient negro woman who had sold him gingerbread and fried fish, and told him weird tales of witchcraft and conjuration, in the old days when, as an idle boy, he had loafed about the market-house.
Katrina G. Claw
Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm, volume=101, issue=3, magazine=(American Scientist) , passage=In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.}}
- to recognize services by a testimonial
- (South)
Derived terms
* recognizability * recognizable * recognizably * recognizance * recognizant * recognization * recognizee * recognizer * recognizorEtymology 2
From re-'' + ''cognizeAlternative forms
* re-cognizeVerb
(recogniz) (North American and Oxford British spelling)irrecognizable
English
Alternative forms
* irrecognisableAdjective
(en adjective)- The immortal gods are there (quite irrecognizable under these disguises), and also the lowest broken valets.
Judge Endlich on Early Life in Berks," Reading Eagle (USA), 15 March, p. 11 (retrieved 26 Aug. 2010):
- [T]here remains no trace of their having ever existed—outside of course of the family names which are now preserved, though some of them in an almost irrecognizable form.
p. 142 of 2005 edition:
- The loamy ground on which I lay, the scattered fragments of the cairn beside me, and the rocks and junipers, were irrecognizable as if they had belonged to some other planet than ours.