Word of the Day
: February 2, 2026prescience
playWhat It Means
Prescience is a formal word used to refer to the ability to see or anticipate what will or might happen in the future.
// He predicted the public's response to the proposed legislation with remarkable prescience.
prescience in Context
"... novelists have always faced technological and social upheaval. They have mostly addressed it in one of two ways. The first is to imagine an altered future with the prescience of science fiction; Mary Shelley's warning that humans are not always in control of their creations is, if anything, even more resonant today than when Frankenstein was first published in 1818." — Jessi Jezewska Stevens, The Dial, 2 Dec. 2025
Did You Know?
If you know the origin of science you already know half the story of prescience. Science comes from the Latin verb sciō, scīre, "to know," also source of such words as conscience, conscious, and omniscience. Prescience has as its ancestor a word that attached prae-, a predecessor of pre-, to this root to make praescire, meaning "to know beforehand."
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Quiz
Fill in the blanks to complete a word that can be used to mean "something that foreshadows a future event": _ a r _ _ n g e _.
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Feb 01
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Jan 30
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Jan 27
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