Prescience

WORD OF THE DAY

prescience / noun / PRESH-ee-unss

Definition
1a: foreknowledge of events
1b: divine omniscience
1c: human anticipation of the course of events
1d: foresight

Examples
"As the author of some of the most searing indictments of the damage governments and people can do, George Orwell has become synonymous with the kind of prescience most artists only dream of."
— Clarke Reader, The Elbert County News (Kiowa, Colorado), 16 Mar. 2022

Especially at the end of the second episode, Apatow and Bonfiglio concentrate on Carlin’s prescience without delving all that deeply into his subsequent appropriation by both sides of the political spectrum.
— Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 17 May 2022

Did You Know?
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