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archives, a place where public records or other historical documents are kept.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:
The message from 1809 -- detailing French and allied troops' positions in two dozen lines of symbols, numbers and letters -- had lain ignored in an online academic archive.
From Barron's ● Oct. 16, 2026
But it’s also a show with a sound bite archive spanning decades which includes such hits as “Jane, you ignorant slut,” from a late-’70s “Weekend Update” sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin.
From Salon ● Oct. 14, 2026
The house took eight years to build on the property where the couple’s previous home burned during the 2018 Woolsey fire, along with Albuquerque’s studio, archive and many of her paintings.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2026
At its heart is the Audre D. Carlin Reading Room, where visitors can request items from the library and archive, including recordings of every production staged at the Globe since the mid-1990s.
From BBC ● Oct. 11, 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 at the French capital's Notre Dame Cathedral, an AI system has been trained to transcribe 14,600 Latin pages from the church's medieval archives -- a task not dissimilar to code-breaking.
From Barron's ● Oct. 16, 2026
From the Moneyist archives, here is Exhibit A: My sister squandered our parents’ millions, asked me to give her $10,000, then made me a tempting offer.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 6, 2026
Mockingbird’s archives are on display at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, depicting a raucous era of music and defiance.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 4, 2026
Following the singer's death, research by staff at Conwy council's archives suggested Parton's ancestors were from Machynlleth, not Conwy as previously thought.
From BBC ● Oct. 2, 2026
About 1,400 letters sent to Welles and The Mercury Theatre survive in library archives.
From "Spooked!" by Gail Jarrow
Read archived story: It could take years for oil prices to return to $67 a barrel.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 5, 2026
"This information is archived in the rocks, so, in order to study what happened, you have to study rocks."
From Science Daily ● Sep. 26, 2026
The GoFundMe made only $8,700, according to the archived page.
From Slate ● Sep. 22, 2026
In an archived TV interview, John said he didn’t think his blind date initially liked him, adding, “But I was going to show her — ‘How dare you not like me?’”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 4, 2026
I later found, amid the thousands of pages of records on the murders archived by the Bureau of Investigation, two other references to Burt.
From "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann
To him, his albums live on as a scrapbook of sorts, archiving nearly all his moments of passion and heartbreak.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2026
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
That sparked an outpouring of grief on social media, with users archiving chat histories and sharing last conversations.
From Barron's ● Jul. 15, 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
By archiving daily output, the translator would soon have access to an enormous "memory" of ready-made solutions for a considerable number of translation problems.
From Multilingualism on the Web by Marie Lebert
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