ancestor

Pluralancestors

Formsancestors, ancestoring, ancestored

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person from whom someone is descended, on either the father's or mother's side, however many generations back.

   Each ancestor on the chart represents a generation further back in time.

   She traced her ancestors back nearly four hundred years through parish records.

   Similarforebear, forefather, progenitor

   Oppositedescendant

   Note

   The kinship sense, and the one the word's history makes literal: Middle English ancestre came through Old French from Latin antecessor, "one who goes before." In the plural it easily stretches from a family to a whole people. The Economist sets modern industrial man beside his hunter-gatherer ancestors, and a descriptive compound of that kind is a natural way to use it.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An earlier form or version from which a later kind developed.

   The harpsichord is often called an ancestor of the piano.

   Paleontologists study the feathered ancestors of modern birds.

   Similarforerunner, precursor, predecessor

   Oppositedescendant

   Note

   Here the line runs between kinds rather than people. A fossil animal can be the ancestor of the horse. The usual construction is the ancestor of followed by a generic noun with the. Progenitor fits both this use and the family sense, which shows how readily the word moves from human lineage to the history of species and things.

3. 3
   nounfigurativelycountable

   A person who filled the same role or office in an earlier period.

   Every modern detective has a literary ancestor in Poe's Dupin.

   Village healers were in many ways the ancestors of our pharmacists.

   Similarforerunner, predecessor, precursor

   Note

   Here the line of descent is a role rather than a bloodline. Sportswriting finds it useful. Saj Chowdhury, reporting a Newcastle win for BBC Sport in 2011, wrote that few expected the class of 2011 to emulate their ancestors, meaning an earlier side. The figure works best with a collective plural and a clearly shared function, such as a team, an office or a trade.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   The original word or phrase behind a term that developed in another language.

   The Sanskrit term is the ancestor of cognates found across the Indo-European family.

   Linguists trace the ancestors of these loanwords through medieval trade routes.

   Similaretymon, root, source

   Note

   Historical linguistics borrows the family tree wholesale. A word in one language becomes the ancestor of a term in another, reached by borrowing or by regular sound change. The metaphor suits the word's own story, since Latin antecessor is itself an ancestor of English ancestor by way of Old French ancestre.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   The person from whom an estate has descended, treated as the correlative of the heir.

   The estate passed directly from the ancestor to the named heir.

   Disputes arose because the ancestor had left no clear title to the land.

   Note

   Law uses the word as one half of a fixed pair. Where there is an heir, the person the estate came from is the ancestor. The term marks a predecessor in title, not necessarily a blood relative. In a legal document it answers the question "whose estate was this?" rather than "who were your forebears?"

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To stand at the origin of a line of descent; to be the forebear of a person or lineage.

   Genealogists showed how one couple ancestored thousands of living descendants.

   A few migrating groups can ancestor whole populations over many generations.

   Note

   The noun turned into a transitive verb that takes its descendants as a direct object. It inflects regularly, as ancestored and ancestoring. Marie Conway Oemler's The Purple Heights (1920) uses it wryly: Pocahontas was created "for the specific purpose of ancestoring Virginians." Peter Loptson's Reality: Fundamental Topics in Metaphysics (2010) puts it to sober philosophical work.

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