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IGNORANCE
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I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
The lack of knowledge or education
Classified under:
Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents
Hypernyms ("ignorance" is a kind of...):
cognitive content; content; mental object (the sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "ignorance"):
ignorantness; nescience; unknowing; unknowingness (ignorance (especially of orthodox beliefs))
inexperience; rawness (lack of experience and the knowledge and understanding derived from experience)
unenlightenment (a lack of understanding)
illiteracy (ignorance resulting from not reading)
Derivation:
ignorant (uneducated in general; lacking knowledge or sophistication)
ignorant (unaware because of a lack of relevant information or knowledge)
ignore (be ignorant of or in the dark about)
Context examples:
Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
He could only plead an ignorance of his own heart, and a mistaken confidence in the force of his engagement.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
It was, to conceal what had occurred, from those who were going away; and to dismiss them on their voyage in happy ignorance.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
My son, through ignorance of his true position, was drifting into a course of life which accorded with his strength and spirit, but not with the traditions of his house.
(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
All my days had been passed in comparative ignorance of the animality of man.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
I shook my head in token of my ignorance, and Ebbits looked compassion at me, while Zilla snorted her customary contempt.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
I glanced at the books upon the table, and in spite of my ignorance of German I could see that two of them were treatises on science, the others being volumes of poetry.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
“Shall I demonstrate your own ignorance? What do you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? What do you know of the black Formosa corruption?”
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Clerval, whose eyes and feelings were always quick in discerning the sensations of others, declined the subject, alleging, in excuse, his total ignorance; and the conversation took a more general turn.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
These two, finding that through his ignorance of the language he was helpless in their hands, had kept him a prisoner, and had endeavoured by cruelty and starvation to make him sign away his own and his sister’s property.
(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
