recognize

Behind this everyday sense lies a 16th-century borrowing that pushed aside the native verb acknow: Latin recognoscere, carried into English through French. John Berger's Ways of Seeing puts the act before language itself: "The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." When recognition half-fails, English reaches for place instead: you know the face but cannot quite place it.

Here the verb rarely stands alone, because it wants a complement. An as-phrase names the quality (slavery is widely recognized as immoral), or a that-clause states the fact (I recognize that my behavior has been unacceptable). The clause version often works as an admission, a way of owning a fault in measured, formal terms.

Diplomacy gives this sense its sharpest use. When governments recognize Kosovo, they accept it as a country rather than merely noticing it. The object is whatever gains official standing, such as a nation, a government or a right. Keep it apart from the award-giving meaning: recognizing a state confers legitimacy, while recognizing a person's service confers praise.

Science uses this sense for perception without a perceiver. Katrina G. Claw, writing in American Scientist in 2013, describes plants that "recognize self from nonself". The pattern recognize X from Y means telling two things apart rather than identifying one. The same impersonal turn reaches its technical extreme in the immunologist's sense.