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''provenance'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260913121849-00-⌔

provenance - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

provenance (countable and uncountable, plural provenances)

  • Place or source of origin.
    • ✤ Many supermarkets display the provenance of their food products.
    • ✤ Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little.1
  • (archaeology) The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage notes below.
    • ✤ This spear is of Viking provenance.
    • ✤ Further support for the Shansi provenance came in 1965, when a bronze quadruped with identical ornamentation and of approximately the same size as the Freer example was unearthed in tomb 126, at Fen-shui-ling, Ch’ang-chih, Shansi Province.2
  • (art) The history of ownership of a work of art.
    • ✤ The picture is of royal provenance.
  • (computing) The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data used to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance).
  • (computing) The execution history of computer processes which were used to compute a final piece of data (process provenance).
  • (of a person) Background; history; place of origin.
    • ✤ Synonym: ancestry

Verb

provenance (third-person singular simple present provenances, present participle provenancing, simple past and past participle provenanced)

  • To establish the provenance of something

Etymology

Borrowed from French provenance (“origin”), from Middle French provenant, present participle of provenir (“come forth, arise”), from Latin provenio (“to come forth”).

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈpɹɒ.və.nəns/, /ˈpɹɒ.vəˌnɒns/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (General American) IPA: /ˈpɹɑ.və.nəns/, /ˈpɹoʊ.və.nɑns/

Printed 2026-09-13.

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Footnotes

  1. 2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings of ASIALEX 2015 Hong Kong, Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, page 147: ↩

  2. 1982, Thomas Lawton, “Bronze Vessels, Fittings, and Weapons”, in Chinese Art of the Warring States Period ‎, Smithsonian Institution, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 79, column 1: ↩