# ancestor

Pronunciation: US say "AN-ses-tur" /ˈæn.sɛs.tɚ/; UK say "AN-ses-tuh" /ˈæn.sɛs.tə/

## Noun

1. A person from whom someone is descended, on either the father's or mother's side, however many generations back.
   - Simple: A family member from long ago that you are descended from.
   - _Each ancestor on the chart represents a generation further back in time._
   - _She traced her ancestors back nearly four hundred years through parish records._
2. An earlier form or version from which a later kind developed.
   - Simple: An older kind of thing that a newer thing came from.
   - _The harpsichord is often called an ancestor of the piano._
   - _Paleontologists study the feathered ancestors of modern birds._
3. A person who filled the same role or office in an earlier period.
   - Simple: Someone who had the same job or role long before you.
   - _Every modern detective has a literary ancestor in Poe's Dupin._
   - _Village healers were in many ways the ancestors of our pharmacists._
4. The original word or phrase behind a term that developed in another language.
   - Simple: An older word that a word in another language comes from.
   - _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._
5. The person from whom an estate has descended, treated as the correlative of the heir.
   - Simple: The person whose property passes down to an 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._

## Verb

6. To stand at the origin of a line of descent; to be the forebear of a person or lineage.
   - Simple: To be the older relative that a later person is descended from.
   - _Genealogists showed how one couple ancestored thousands of living descendants._
   - _A few migrating groups can ancestor whole populations over many generations._

## Origin

This word came into Middle English from Old French ancestre (modern French ancêtre), which came from Latin antecessor, meaning "one who goes before." That Latin word is built from antecedo ("to go before"), formed from ante- ("before") and cedo ("to go").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/ancestor (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).