archive
Americannoun
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archives
plural
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Usually archives. documents or records relating to the activities, business dealings, etc., of a person, family, corporation, association, community, or nation.
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archives, a place where public records or other historical documents are kept.
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any extensive record or collection of data.
The encyclopedia is an archive of world history. The experience was sealed in the archive of her memory.
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Digital Technology.
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a long-term storage device, as a disk or magnetic tape, or a computer directory or folder that contains copies of files for backup or future reference.
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a collection of digital data stored in this way.
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a computer file containing one or more compressed files.
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a collection of information permanently stored on the internet.
The magazine has its entire archive online, from 1923 to the present.
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verb (used with object)
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archives,
present (3rd person singular)
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archived,
past participle, past
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archiving
present participle
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to place or store in an archive.
to vote on archiving the city's historic documents.
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Digital Technology. to compress (computer files) and store them in a single file.
noun
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a collection of records of or about an institution, family, etc
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a place where such records are kept
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computing data transferred to a tape or disk for long-term storage rather than frequent use
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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archivesimple
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archivessimple
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have archivedperfect
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has archivedperfect
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am archivingprogressive
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are archivingprogressive
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is archivingprogressive
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have been archivingperfect progressive
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has been archivingperfect progressive
Past
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archivedsimple
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had archivedperfect
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was archivingprogressive
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were archivingprogressive
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had been archivingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of archive
First recorded in 1595–1605; originally, as plural, from French archives, from the Late Latin plural noun archīva, archīa “public records,” from Greek archeîa “public records,” plural of archeîon “town hall, public office,” equivalent to archḗ “magistracy, office” + -eion suffix of location
Explanation
An archive is a collection of older things — documents, books, movies, or something else — that's meant to preserve them. Archives tell us about history. An archive involves old stuff — specifically, a collection of old stuff, often put together by a librarian. Newspaper archives collect old newspapers, usually all copies of a paper from a certain date onward. There are movie and music archives. Most museums have many types of archives within them. And it's always a good idea to keep an archive of important files on your computer. When you put something in an archive, you're archiving it.
Vocabulary lists containing archive
Play by the Rules: Arch
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The View from Saturday
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arch
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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:
There are more than 25,000 costumes and other items kept in its archive and all the outfits for its performances are made in-house.
From BBC ● Sep. 18, 2026
We commemorate the long shadow of 9/11, as told through the WSJ archive.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026
In the care of one another, our archive begins to take shape.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2026
Peter said library staff "wanted to give the books to the archive department to investigate further".
From BBC ● Sep. 10, 2026
He tried without success to get into archive editions of Forverts, but seeing as he had no Yiddish and limited ability to access any kind of database, he quickly exhausted his search.
From "Night Owls" by A.R. Vishny
And historian Dr Michael Lambert, from Lancaster University, argued that archives held privately by religious congregations could help "unlock" important pieces of history.
From BBC ● Sep. 18, 2026
“It was the opportunity to go back to the archives and study a chapter of family legacy,” says Pierpaolo.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 17, 2026
These natural archives allowed the researchers to reconstruct Indian and Pacific Ocean climate conditions back to the early 1600s.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 13, 2026
Prosecutors argued that evidence in the case, including the statue and archives from the Hong Kong Alliance's museum, should be confiscated.
From Barron's ● Sep. 11, 2026
I crank up Spotify and log onto my art Tumblr, scrolling through my archives.
From "Leah on the Offbeat" by Becky Albertalli
In a study published September 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, examined archived observations of seven young stars.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 17, 2026
A new analysis by Stanford University economists Nick Bloom and Gideon Moore compared current LinkedIn profiles to archived versions of such profiles that existed before 2023.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026
"When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services," the spokeswoman added.
From BBC ● Jul. 27, 2026
"Much like at a crime scene, everything is documented, archived, and then cleaned up," Marroni said.
From Barron's ● May 21, 2026
I explained how I’d seen Jesse install operating systems, play online games from chess to Quake, use astonishing ingenuity to gather archived information off the Web.
From "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho" by Jon Katz
The promotion is part of the brand’s partnership with StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit focused on archiving the stories of everyday people.
From Salon ● Apr. 27, 2026
All three of us share a focus on researching, archiving and documenting Black modernism and space.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 13, 2026
Sanborn has acknowledged his error in archiving the crucial information -- but he downplayed the discovery.
From Barron's ● Nov. 19, 2025
Asked in 2019 why it was important to archive objects from hip-hop, Morgan said that archiving is a way of recognizing the things that matter to a society and to preserve them for future generations.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 31, 2025
The archiving process in some cases took up to 48 hours from when the page was blocked.
From Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling by United States District Court For The Eastern District Of Pennsylvania
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.
