The word entered English in 1583, from Latin. Sir Thomas Smith, an English diplomat and scholar, used it in his De Republica Anglorum, a book on English government, law, and social institutions. He described what a jury might write on the back of an indictment, when the evidence against a person fell short.
It came directly from Latin, an entire sentence rather than a single word. In Latin it meant 'we do not know', the first person plural of a verb meaning to pay no attention to, or to be unaware of.
Behind the Latin verb lay two parts, a prefix meaning not, and an old adjective meaning aware, or acquainted with. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *gno-, meaning 'to know', the same root that gave English 'know'.
NOBLE and NARRATE share the same root. NOBLE entered English around 1200, from Old French, from a Latin word meaning 'knowable', because well-known Roman families supplied most of the Republic's public officials. NARRATE, meaning to tell or relate in detail, entered English later, in 1748, though for a century it was considered a Scotticism, dismissed by writers including Samuel Johnson as a word used only in Scotland.
In 1615 the playwright George Ruggle wrote a Latin satire mocking common lawyers, giving its central character the same name as the legal notation. Within a year the word had become a general insult for a type of person. In 1681 a London grand jury used the legal sense to reject charges of high treason against the Earl of Shaftesbury, and critics of that jury borrowed the word's newer, insulting meaning to mock them in return.
