These words refer to oversights or failures to remember or act. Forget suggest a failure to keep something in mind, either because of its unimportance or complexity, or because of an unintentional lapse: She forgot all about the gossip as soon as she reported it; forgetting the way to the station; forgetting to water the plants as he had promised to do.

Overlook and omit are both more specific than forget in suggesting almost exclusively failures to act. The failure may be slight and excusable and may be either intentional or deliberate. Overlook concentrates on a failure to notice or check something: He had overlooked the fact that the back door was not locked; councillors who deliberately overlook the real needs of the city. The word might also refer to a conscious decision to excuse someone else’s failing: He agreed to overlook her breach of confidence this once. Omit suggests a failure to act in a certain approved way. Extenuating circumstances may be implied for the reason of the failure, but conscious intention may also be motivation: omitting , in my haste, to tell her where I was going; omitting to tell the doctor the whole story behind the child’s injury. The word, in a related sense, can refer to the deletion of something, usually because it might be thought disadvantageous or unpleasant: They omitted from the report any mention of the programme’s difficulties. Except in this sense of deletion, omit is the one word here that might no longer sound fresh or natural in ordinary conversation.

Neglect may suggest an inadvertent failure to act, but more often its connotation is one of deliberate inattention: His secretary had neglected to double-check the correspondence file.

• Forgetting one or two small details is one thing, but neglecting the major responsibilities of your job is something else again.