prescience

If you know the origin of "science," you already know half the story of "prescience." "Science" comes from the Latin verb scire, which means "to know" and which is the source of many English words ("conscience," "conscious," and "omniscience," just to name a few). "Prescience" comes from the Latin verb praescire, which means "to know beforehand." "Praescire" joins the verb "scire" with the prefix prae-, a predecessor of "pre-." A lesser-known "scire"-derived word is "nescience." Nescience means "ignorance" and comes from "scire" plus "ne-," which means "not" in Latin.