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''antecedent'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''antecedent'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250726113333-00-⌔

antecedent - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

antecedent (not comparable)

  • Earlier, either in time or in order.
    • ✤ Synonyms: precedent, predecessive, preceding
    • ✤ Antonym: successive
    • ✤ an antecedent cause
    • ✤ an event antecedent to the Biblical Flood
  • Presumptive.
    • ✤ an antecedent improbability

Noun

📊 ➺

antecedent (plural antecedents)

  • Any thing that precedes another thing, especially the cause of the second thing.
  • An ancestor.
    • ✤ The Boston agent added that this clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracity and reliability, of known antecedents and long with the company.1
  • (grammar) A word, phrase or clause referred to by a pronoun or other pro-form.
    • ✤ [W]hereas it might seem orderly that, as who is appropriated to persons, so that should have been appropriated to things […] the antecedent of that is often personal2
    • ✤ *One such condition can be formulated in terms of the c-command relation defined in (9) above: the relevant condition is given in (16) below:
      (16) C-COMMAND CONDITION ON ANAPHORS
      An anaphor must have an appropriate c-commanding antecedent *3
  • (logic) The conditional part of a hypothetical proposition, i.e. , where is the antecedent, and is the consequent.
  • (logic) The first of two subsets of a sequent, consisting of all the sequent’s formulae which are valuated as true.
  • (mathematics) The first term of a ratio, i.e. the term a in the ratio a:b, the other being the consequent.
  • (chiefly in the plural) Previous principles, conduct, history, etc.

Etymology

From Middle English antecedent, borrowed from Old French antecedent, from Latin antecēdēns (“going before”), from antecēdō (“to precede; excel; surpass”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˌæntɪˈsiːdənt/
  • Audio (Canada): 🔊
  • Audio (UK): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɛnt

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1931, H. P. Lovecraft, chapter 3, in The Whisperer in Darkness: ↩

  2. 1926, H. W. Fowler, “that rel. pron.”, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, reprint of the first edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, published 2002, →ISBN, page 634, column 2: ↩

  3. 1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 117: ↩

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Secondary

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