antecedence
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ænˈtɛsɪdəns/
Forms: form: antecedences
Etymology: From Latin antecēdentia from Latin antecēdēns (“preceding”), from antecēdō (“go before”).
Senses: examples: text: […] your […] darke argument […] is this breifly in fewe wordes. The office […] of charite is to geue life ergo charitie iustifieth. […] But what and if I denye your antecedence, and proue it by scripture, that faith and not loue is the lyfe of the iustified.
ref: 1546, George Joye, The Refutation of the Byshop of Winchesters Derke Declaration of His False Articles, London: J. Herford, page lxi:
text: 1651, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London: Andrew Crooke, “Of Man,” Chapter 12, p. 52,
[…] whereas there is no other Felicity of Beasts, but the enjoying of their quotidian Food, Ease, and Lusts; as having little, or no foresight of the time to come, for want of observation, and memory of the order, consequence, and dependance of the things they see; Man observeth how one Event hath been produced by another; and remembreth in them Antecedence and Consequence;
text: […] we are concerned with those relations of antecedence or sequence which it is impossible to think of as other than we know them.
ref: 1855, Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, § 33, p. 129:
text: […] the phrase ‘Pre-pottery Neolithic’ has been coined, but this clumsy term carries with it an implication of antecedence to all pottery-using cultures, which is misleading, as such cultures were sometimes only locally without pottery as a cultural trait in areas where potter-making existed in close proximity.
ref: 1965, Grahame Clark, Stuart Piggott, chapter 8, in Prehistoric Societies, New York: Knopf, page 165:
synonyms: word: precedence
word: priority
word: antecedence
word: antecedency
word: anteriority
word: precedence
word: priority
antonyms: word: subsequence
word: anteriority
glosses: The relationship of preceding something in time or order.
examples: text: […] it is pleasantly notable […] with what desperate intensity, vigilance, and fierceness Madame watches over all his interests, and liabilities, and casualties great and small, leaping with her whole force into M. de Voltaire’s scale of the balance, careless of antecedences and consequences alike; flying with the spirit of an angry brood-hen, at the face of mastiffs in defense of any feather that is M. de Voltaire’s.
ref: 1858, Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich the Second, New York: Harper, Volume 2, Book 10, Chapter 2, p. 461:
text: The literature on the French Revolution and its antecedence is vast.
ref: 1988, Rupert Christiansen, Romantic Affinities, New York: Putnam, page 253:
text: The child she had conceived in terror, had carried in shame, and had borne in pain had been given the name of that paradisal spring which could, if anything could, wash antecedence into non-existence and torment into calm.
ref: 1993, Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, Boston: Little, Brown:
text: He had at no time been sympathetic to Tyler’s Jewish aspirations. He didn’t need to be married to a Jew. He was Jew enough — at least in his antecedence — for both of them.
ref: 2010, Howard Jacobson, chapter 11, in The Finkler Question, New York: Bloomsbury, page 271:
glosses: That which precedes something or someone (e.g. prior events, origin, ancestry).
examples: 1851, John Richardson, Arctic Searching Expedition, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, Volume 2, Appendix, No. 2, pp. 239-240,
The average antecedence of spring phenomena at Carlton House to their occurrence at Cumberland House is between a fortnight and three weeks.
1949, William Scott Ferguson, “Orgeonika” in Commemorative Studies in Honor of Theodore Leslie Shear, Hesperia Supplement VIII, reprint, Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1975, p. 146,
[…] the following year would have shown an antecedence of the conciliar year over the civil of […] fourteen days.
glosses: The length of time by which one event or time period precedes another.
examples: text: Sometimes this defect amounts to a blundering obliviousness of all antecedence. The following tearful reproof was given by a judge of the State of New York to a prisoner just convicted: “[…] nature has endowed you with a good education and respectable family connections, instead of which you go around the country stealing ducks.”
ref: 1895, Austin Phelps, Henry Allyn Frink, chapter 13, in Rhetoric: Its Theory and Practice, New York: Scribner, page 109:
text: The pronouns who and which and what, used interrogatively, […] may refer to a word or to words in the answer to a question, but their antecedence may be indefinite or unrevealed, even after the answer is given.
ref: 1941, John B. Opdycke, Harper’s English Grammar, New York: Popular Library, published 1965, Part 1, Chapter 2, p. 52:
topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: The relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent.
examples: 2005, Wallace R. Hansen, The Geologic Story of the Uinta Mountains, Guilford, CT: Falcon, 2nd ed., p. 26,
Speculation as to how the Green River established its course across the Uinta Mountains led Powell to introduce such terms as “superposition” and “antecedence” to identify processes by which streams are able to establish and maintain courses across mountain barriers.
topics: geography
geology
natural-sciences
glosses: A geologic process that explains how and why antecedent rivers can cut through mountain systems instead of going around them.
topics: astronomy
natural-sciences
synonyms: retrogradation
glosses: An apparent motion of a planet toward the west.
Synonyms: antecedency
antecession
Related terms: word: antecede
word: antecedent
word: antecedently
word: antecessor