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:
In 2008, during a concert at the Cardiff International Arena, Parton reportedly revealed her Welsh ancestry to fans in the crowd.
From BBC ● Oct. 2, 2026
Sickle-cell disease, also called SCD, disproportionately appears in people of African ancestry, affecting around 90,000 black Americans today.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 9, 2026
About 22% said being Jewish is a matter of culture, while 21% said it was a matter of ancestry.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 6, 2026
Modern taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying organisms, increasingly attempts to reflect actual evolutionary relationships by grouping species according to shared ancestry.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 20, 2026
When these townships were established, Afrikaners, or whites of Dutch ancestry, made up 9 percent of the population.
From "The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates" by Wes Moore
The Latino vote is both vast and diverse, encompassing communities of varied ancestries, economic power and relative size.
From BBC ● Jan. 18, 2026
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
They are a merry, well-nourished collection of waifs and strays, of all ancestries, Hindu, Muhammadan, and Christian, mostly gathered in through the wards of the Mission Hospitals.
From Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India by Alice B. Van Doren
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.
