ancestry
Americannoun
-
ancestries
plural
noun
-
lineage or descent, esp when ancient, noble, or distinguished
-
ancestors collectively
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of ancestry
1300–50; Middle English, equivalent to ancestre ancestor + -y 3; replacing Middle English aunce ( s ) trie < Anglo-French
Explanation
Have a family tree hanging on the wall? Then you know a bit about your ancestry, or family history and lineage. If you think ancestry sounds like ancestor, then you're headed in the right direction. Ancestry is basically a history of ancestors, a trail of where your family started and all the descendants that followed. But ancestry goes much further than just your great-great-grand uncle's brother. You can also use the word ancestry to refer to the background of things other than people — such as the ancestry of a building or the ancestry of a nation.
Vocabulary lists containing ancestry
It's All in the Family
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Central America and the Caribbean - Introductory
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Central America and the Caribbean - Middle School and High School
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
While most Native Americans could explain where the ginger gene might have come from, there was one exception - a Cherokee girl called Lakia - whose family knew of no European ancestry.
From BBC ● Aug. 1, 2026
Denisovan genomes contain an estimated 3% to 5% super-archaic ancestry.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 1, 2026
Sara Dosa’s latest documentary follows Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason as he reflects on his country’s diminishing glaciers and how they connect with his ancestry.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 30, 2026
If Sapiens women had, in fact, regularly entered Neanderthal groups, we would expect to see a recent genetic signal of Sapiens ancestry persisting among the last Neanderthals.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
In contrast, some tribes in northern Australia gave more importance to a person’s maternal ancestry, and a person’s tribal identity depended on his or her totem rather than his territory.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
But Prof Kumaresan says that more research is needed to properly establish the ancestries of Keeladi's residents.
From BBC ● Aug. 23, 2025
Harris’ own blended ethno-racial background of Jamaican and Indian ancestries was a consequence of her parents' freedom.
From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2024
Census making it easier in 2020 to identify multiple racial and ethnic ancestries, the percentage of multiracial Americans blossomed to 33.8 million.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2024
Together with the mix of ancestries, that suggests that at least in Bréviandes, the newcomers didn’t aggressively take over.
From Science Magazine ● Jun. 19, 2024
BUT Love has more to do with his own possible and probable posterities, than with the once living but now impossible ancestries in the past.
From Pierre; or The Ambiguities by Melville, Herman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
