priors
- 1Plural of prior.
The priors of the neighboring abbeys gathered for the annual council.
Detectives reviewed the suspect's priors before beginning the interview.
Note
One regular plural serves three quite different worlds: monastic superiors, statistics, and criminal records. In the criminal sense the plural is the natural home. In the US and Canada a suspect is said to have priors, meaning earlier arrests or convictions on record. Statisticians use the word for prior probability distributions. More broadly, rationalist writing uses it for beliefs drawn from earlier evidence and carried into new inferences.
priors is a form of prior
prior, noun: An earlier arrest or criminal conviction recorded on someone's criminal record. Full entry
- Forms
- priorpriors plural
- Spelling
- prior → priors: add -s
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with priors, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.