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:
Jeff, 62, who has UK citizenship from his Scottish ancestry, is currently in Wrexham house-hunting, while Janice, 65, is in the USA selling their home and awaiting her visa.
From BBC ● Aug. 10, 2026
Denisovan genomes contain an estimated 3% to 5% super-archaic ancestry.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 1, 2026
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
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
“They were of Japanese ancestry, but they had built lives in America. They were part of American communities.”
From "Here to Stay" by Sara Farizan
The Latino vote is both vast and diverse, encompassing communities of varied ancestries, economic power and relative size.
From BBC ● Jan. 18, 2026
The blood samples in this dataset were collected from a cohort of 503 healthy donors of diverse Asian ancestries, spanning East, Southeast, and South Asian populations.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 4, 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
They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise quite empty.
From Character and Opinion in the United States by George Santayana
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.
