What does disremembering mean?
Disremembering is a rare English verb meaning “to fail to remember” or simply “to forget.” It is especially evocative in literary and historical prose, where it can suggest the erosion of memory or a collective culture’s loss of its own past. A writer might describe a town as disremembering a disaster, or a family as having disremembered an ancestor. Unlike the more familiar “misremembering,” which means remembering something incorrectly, disremembering points to an absence or failure of recollection rather than a distortion. The word is formed from the prefix “dis-” and “remember,” and is related to “remember,” “remembrance,” “memory,” and “memorial.” Because it is uncommon and can sound deliberately poetic or archaic, it is better suited to formal or creative contexts than to routine conversation. Used carefully, it gives ordinary forgetting a striking, almost elegiac quality.
verbTo fail to remember; to forget.
- To fail to remember or forget something.
"The archive preserves what the city spent years disremembering."
"The novel imagines a society disremembering its own history."
"In his old age, he began disremembering the names of familiar streets."
The word remembers what you cannot: it is simply “not remembering” in an old-fashioned, literary disguise.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Where does disremembering come from?
The form disremembering is the present participle of the now-rare English verb disremember, built with dis- and remember. Remember entered Middle English from Old French remembrer, ultimately from Latin rememorari, a compound of re- (“again”) and memoria (“memory”). The same Latin root underlies memory, memorial, and remembrance.
Related word forms
How disremembering is actually used
Rare and chiefly literary; in contemporary English, “forget” is more usual. The word can suggest the erosion of individual or collective memory.
Easily confused with disremembering
Disremembering means failing to remember, whereas misremembering means remembering something incorrectly.