Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Occurring or existing without the knowledge of; unknown: a crisis unbeknown to us.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
Wiktionary
- adj. not beknown
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. colloq. Not known; unknown.
WordNet 3.0
- adv. without someone's knowledge
- adj. (usually used with `to') occurring or existing without the knowledge of
Etymologies
- Back-formation of unbeknownst. (Wiktionary)
- un-1 + obsolete beknown, known (from Middle English beknowen, past participle of beknowen, to get to know, from Old English becnāwan : be-, be- + cnāwan, to know; see know). (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“WITNESS: It 'adn't bin, but my nevy bein' a watchmaker, called unbeknown to me, an 'made it right on Thursday night, which it was”
“WITNESS: It ’adn’t bin, but my nevy bein’ a watchmaker, called unbeknown to me, an’ made it right on”
“In preparing the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy-bottle, and said the lemonade would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest said, if he could do so "unbeknown" to him, he would "not object.”
“The fabulously rich and entirely heartless hero has not merely the extravagance but (which is very rare with Gautier) the vulgarity of Byronism; the opening orgie, by an oversight so strange that it may almost seem to be no oversight at all, reminds one only too forcibly of the ironic treatment accorded to that institution in _Les Jeune-France_, and suffers from the reminder; the blending of East and West and the _Arabian Night_ harems in Paris, "unbeknown" to everybody, [210] almost attain that”
A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century
“Waymarsh has been, 'unbeknown' to me, I'm convinced" -- for Miss Gostrey had enquired -- "in communication with”
“From which illustration I inferred that Mr. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, "unbeknown" to him. ”
“But in fact, unbeknown to her friends, she was an undercover police officer.”
The Guardian: Second police officer to infiltrate environmental activists unmasked
“You were my first friend in Mexico (unbeknown to you) through your web site.”
“And, unbeknown to my daughters, I also had the reality of a big credit card bill and much work to do dismantling the idyllic, beautiful holiday I created to prove our family's dreams weren't melting on the path to divorce.”
The Huffington Post: Sharon Zarozny: Should We Feed Our Kids The Marriage Fantasy?
“Putnam's job was to make sure that the manmade island and all manmade products -- foods, waste, fuels, trash -- were secured from the federally-protected animal, which had denned there sometime in late October to give birth, unbeknown to wildlife officials or work crews.”
The Huffington Post: AlaskaDispatch.com: Spy Island Polar Bears, Meet the World
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘unbeknown’.
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Un-word List
untrammelled, untoward, unenthusiastically, unenthusiastic, undaunted, uncanny, unceasing, unbridled, unacknowledged, unacquainted, unadorned, unaffected and 239 more...
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Rita's List of Words
preliminary, rudimentary, stance, conduit, locale, implicit, vicissitude, empirical, repository, apophthegm, apothegm, invariable and 431 more...
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adjectives
sartorial, saucy, wieldy, wuthering, dilapidated, rough-and-ready, flabbergasted, ravishing, seminal, snooty, galore, scrumptious and 386 more...
Tweets
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