The noun ken means "range of vision or comprehension." If quantum mechanics is beyond your ken, you don't understand it, or it is beyond your scope of knowledge.
- Pronunciation: /kɛn/
- English description: range of what one can know or understand
- Synonyms: cognizance
- Chinese Translation: 见地(jian4 di4)
- Spanish Translation: algn
- ORIGIN: Ken is rarely used today outside of the phrase, "beyond one's ken." It goes all the way back, however, to Proto Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of most European, Near Eastern, and South Asian languages. Coming from the root *gno- "to know," ken has many relatives in modern English such as incognito, cunning, and know itself.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- If something is beyond your ken, you do not have enough knowledge to be able to understand it.
- The subject matter was so technical as to be beyond the ken of the average layman.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com