The word NOT was originally provided in Forth as a flag operator to make control structures readable. Under its intended usage the following two definitions would produce identical results:

This was common usage prior to the Forth-83 Standard which redefined NOT as a cell-wide one's-complement operation, functionally equivalent to the phrase -1 XOR. At the same time, the data type manipulated by this word was changed from a flag to a cell-wide collection of bits and the standard value for true was changed from "1" (rightmost bit only set) to "-1" (all bits set). As these definitions of TRUE and NOT were incompatible with their previous definitions, many Forth users continue to rely on the old definitions. Hence both versions are in common use.

Therefore, usage of NOT cannot be standardized at this time. The two traditional meanings of NOT — that of negating the sense of a flag and that of doing a one's complement operation — are made available by 0= and INVERT, respectively.