on the tip of one's tongue

on the tip of one's tongue

1. Known but not quite able to be recalled.

   Her name is on the tip of my tongue: it's Kathy, or Karen, or something.

   • 2001, Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory, How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Houghton Mifflin, →ISBN:

     The feeling that a blocked word or name is on the tip of the tongue appears to be a near-universal experience. The cognitive psychologist Bennett Schwarz surveyed speakers of fifty-one different languages and found that forty-five of them contain expressions using "the tongue" to describe situations […]

• TOT
• lethologica
• presque vu

• tip of the tongue on Wikipedia.Wikipedia