Notes:

• The first practice sentence above expesses the idea that only God is truly able to know everything.
• In the second practice sentence above, an omniscient narrator in a work of fiction not only describes the external action of the story, which could have been observed by anyone who was present, but also is able to go inside the characters’ minds to tell us what they were thnking. Sometimes the narrator’s omniscience is limited to only one central character; this is known as a third-person reflector narrator, meaning that the narrator reflects the thoughts of the central character to the reader while being limited to describing all of the other characters and external events objectively. This is similar to a first-person narrator who is a character in the story and is, of course, free to tell the reader what he or she is thinking but not what other characters are thinking.
• Since it is very difficult to have omniscience, the word is frequently used in the negative usually with sarcasm to defend oneself against a charge of not knowing something, as is shown in the third practice sentence above. The inference is “How could I possibly know this unless I were omniscient?”—which, of course, no one can be.