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:
Eleven of the 30 children have now taken commercial DNA tests which show they have inherited genetic ancestry from Turkey or surrounding countries.
From BBC ● Aug. 18, 2026
But the Constitution subjects race or ancestry quotas to an extraordinarily high level of judicial scrutiny.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 17, 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
They bonded over common ancestry, and one day Zeitoun asked Ahmaad if he knew any single women who might be appropriate for him.
From "Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers
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
But I think the biggest challenge is to bring in scientists of diverse ancestries into this—that’s really what we want.
From Science Magazine ● May 23, 2024
The more difficult cases, for the eugenist, are rather to be found in such ancestries as those of Louis Pasteur and Michael Faraday.
From Applied Eugenics by Paul Popenoe
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.
