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:
By tracing cellular ancestry and identifying when different developmental pathways emerge, scientists may gain a clearer understanding of how these problems begin.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 13, 2026
Intriguingly it might be influenced, at least to some extent, by your ancestry.
From BBC ● Sep. 17, 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
In the late 1970s several scientists realized that an ethnic group’s mitochondrial DNA could provide clues to its ancestry.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
The features also reveal traces of Middle-East Eurasian and Austro-Asiactic ancestries, hinting at global migration and the mixing of ancient population groups.
From BBC ● Aug. 23, 2025
This highlights an urgent need for genetic studies that better represent diverse ancestries.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 4, 2024
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
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
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
