- 1
Not knowing what is really happening — and so not to blame for it. An unwitting person is caught up in something without understanding it: "an unwitting witness," "the unwitting victim of a scam," "unwitting who thought they were doing charity work." The key idea is innocence through ignorance. You did play a part in it, but you had no idea, so no one can say it was your fault. That is why it appears so often with words like `accomplice`, `victim`, `participant`, `carrier`, and `助手`-type roles: the newspaper is telling you "this person was in the story, but did not know the story." There is a second, quieter use: `unwitting` can describe the act itself rather than the person — "an unwitting insult," "his unwitting mistake." Here it means the person did not mean to do it and did not notice doing it. It is a formal, written word. In everyday speech people say "he had no idea" or "she didn't know." You will read `unwitting` in news reports, court stories, and history books far more often than you will hear it in a café. Almost always it stands in front of a noun (an unwitting fool). Saying "he was unwitting" alone is unusual and sounds odd to most speakers.
不知情的、渾然不覺的(通常帶有「因此無辜、不算共犯」的意思)
組成un-(不)+ witting(知道的)。witting 來自很古老的動詞 wit「知道」——就是 to wit(也就是說)和 witness(見證人)裡的那個 wit。古英語寫作 unwitende「不知道的」。今天單獨的 witting 幾乎沒人用了,反而是加了 un- 的這個字活了下來。
同家族的字
- witthe old verb 'to know' — the piece un- is attached to
- witnesssame wit 'know' root: one who knows what happened
- unwittinglythe adverb built straight off this word
- outwitsame wit root, in the sense of knowing/cleverness
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
unwittingadj
- 1
Unaware or uninformed; oblivious.
- We've located the perfect site for experimentation on live test subjects. Kadara's "badlands" offer unsupervised access to unwitting test subjects free from any lawful or ethical constraints.
- 2
Unintentional.
- (transl.) 4th century BC, Plato, Sophist, 230a Some people, apparently, have thought about it and reached the conclusion that every case of being misinformed is unwitting.
- Persistent but unwitting excessive speed over a sharply curved turnout forming part of a double junction, which resulted in slight track distortion, was the primary cause of the derailment of an electric m.u. at Bethnal Green on Saturday, June 17 last.
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。