The word entered English around 1430, drawing on both French and Latin at once. Its earliest recorded sense named a form of jury inquiry introduced to England by the early Norman kings, its practice first recorded in a treatise by Ranulf de Glanville, Chief Justiciar under Henry II.
French carried the word into English. In Anglo-Norman French, by the fourteenth century, the word named the formal acknowledgement that a debt was owed. In Latin the same word was used for something else, a formal inspection or review.
Two parts built the Latin word, a prefix meaning again, and a verb meaning to come to know. Behind that verb lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *gno-, meaning to know, the same ancient root that gave English the word 'know'.
QUAINT and INCOGNITO share the same root as this word. QUAINT entered English around 1200, from Old French, first meaning clever, or crafty, before drifting through elegant, then strange, and finally settling into charmingly old-fashioned. INCOGNITO entered English in the 1640s, from Italian, describing someone travelling under a false name, unknown to those around them.
By the sixteenth century the word had entered the English coronation service, the moment in the ceremony when those attending are asked whether they will have this man, or woman, as their king or queen, still one of six essential parts of the ceremony today. In 1748 Tobias Smollett used the same word in his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, describing a character who showed not the slightest sign of it upon meeting someone.
