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archives, a place where public records or other historical documents are kept.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:
Littleton Auctions is handling sale and say the tapes, recorded directly from the sound desk, form the only master archive of their kind.
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
Peter said library staff "wanted to give the books to the archive department to investigate further".
From BBC ● Sep. 10, 2026
Rosales absented herself from the archive, letting the images do the talking.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2026
She was talking about the archive reference I’d written in my hand.
From "Code Name Verity" by Elizabeth Wein
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
Ms. Sutherland’s job gave them access to cereal-box images from Kellogg’s extensive archives.
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
Their predecessors in this included the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites, who all kept significant archives of clay cuneiform tablets in their palaces and temple precincts.
From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro
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
Luhrmann didn’t end up using the archived material in “Elvis.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 24, 2026
The Librarian looks up and to the left like he’s retrieving something deep within his archived program.
From "The Last Cuentista" by Donna Barba Higuera
Saving and archiving AI chat transcripts across platforms can create a searchable snapshot of a user’s work in progress and thinking process.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 9, 2026
When I started studying this and archiving it for my book, I was really focused on the more mainstream establishment media.
From Salon ● Jan. 20, 2026
Sanborn has acknowledged his error in archiving the crucial information -- but he downplayed the discovery.
From Barron's ● Nov. 19, 2025
Dr Mark Farrell, who is the Panel's expert member for archiving, explained: "It will essentially be a one-stop shop, a central location for all of the relevant records that relate to the truth recovery process."
From BBC ● Aug. 30, 2025
Several projects are currently under way in such areas as electronic document archiving and retrieval, bilingual/multilingual text alignment, computer-assisted translation, translation memory and terminology database management, and speech recognition.
From Multilingualism on the Web by Marie Lebert
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.
