forgotten

Pluralforgottens

1. 1
   verb

   Past participle of forget.

   She had forgotten where she left her keys.

   The old harvest festival has been forgotten by most younger residents.

   Note

   Here the form does the verb's work rather than describing anything. With have it builds the perfect (she has forgotten); with be it builds the passive (the festival was forgotten). The passive needs a transitive use, such as losing remembrance of something or leaving it behind. Keep the pair apart: I forgot is the simple past, and I have forgotten is the perfect.

2. 2
   adjective

   No longer remembered; lost from memory or common knowledge.

   A forgotten language survives only in a handful of stone inscriptions.

   His early paintings stayed forgotten until a collector rediscovered them.

   Similarlost, obscure, neglected, overlooked, unremembered

   Oppositecelebrated

   Note

   The participle turned into a description: forgot plus the old -en ending, the same shape as broken or spoken. Unlike many participles, it takes degree freely: more forgotten, most forgotten. That lets a writer grade how far something has slipped from memory, as in one of the most forgotten poets of her age, rather than simply sorting things into remembered and lost.

3. 3
   noun

   A person or thing that is no longer remembered.

   The memorial honors the forgotten of the war, soldiers buried in graves without names.

   Each January the magazine revisits the decade's forgotten: gadgets, fads, and minor celebrities nobody mentions anymore.

   Note

   A noun that lets the person or thing be named by its fate alone, and it counts: one forgotten, several forgottens. Alan Feuer reaches for the plural in 2007, looking back on the year's "unfortunate forgottens" as New Year approaches. That -s ending is what marks it as a true noun rather than the adjective standing after the.

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