I wouldn’t have believed it if I had told myself a few years ago that I needed to explain the difference between “unknown” and “unaware”. Yeah! I was pretty ignorant back then. I was unaware of the differences in our education and your backgrounds were unknown to me.

But, for some reason, in the past few days, I’ve evaluated at least 6 writings that contained mistakes about “unknown” and “unaware”. Three of my clients didn’t know the difference between these words. So, here I am explaining the difference to you to help you avoid making silly mistakes with these words. There is a quiz at the end of this post so make sure you do it.

My client wrote: I have never been to Canada so I’ll be completely unknown about everything.

Did you see any mistakes? I can see at least 2 mistakes in this sentence.

“Unknown” versus “unaware”

Examples:

✅ The exact number of people carrying the virus is unknown.

✅ As recently as six months ago her name was almost unknown in this country.

✅ Unknown TO me, she’d organized a party for my birthday.

Examples:

✅ [ + that ] He was unaware that the police were watching him.

✅ I was completely unaware of the problem.

✅ I was unaware of the risks involved.

Quiz time!

Did you see the mistakes in the sentence above yet? Leave your answer in a comment.

To help you make sure you won’t make mistakes with these words, I have a quiz for you.