predate
Americanverb
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to affix a date to (a document, paper, etc) that is earlier than the actual date
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to assign a date to (an event, period, etc) that is earlier than the actual or previously assigned date of occurrence
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to be or occur at an earlier date than; precede in time
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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predatesimple
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predatessimple
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have predatedperfect
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has predatedperfect
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am predatingprogressive
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are predatingprogressive
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is predatingprogressive
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have been predatingperfect progressive
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has been predatingperfect progressive
Past
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predatedsimple
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had predatedperfect
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was predatingprogressive
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were predatingprogressive
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had been predatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of predate
Explanation
To predate is to happen or exist before something else. If you move into a house that already has a ghost, the ghost predates you. Boo! If your interest in soul music predates your sister's, you loved it first. When you use predate this way, you can read it as a combination of pre-, "before," and date, "point in time." Another meaning of this verb is "to prey on for food," so you could say that your cat predates the mice that live in your kitchen. This definition stems from predator, from the Latin praedator, "plunderer."
Vocabulary lists containing predate
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:
But many such laws predate modern prediction markets and haven’t necessarily been tested in court recently.
From Salon ● Aug. 13, 2026
Their experiments suggest that the attraction to crystals may have deep evolutionary origins that predate modern humans.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 15, 2026
“In our view, the key to the current policy stance in Norway is that inflation concerns predate this spring’s energy price volatility,” ING foreign exchange strategist Francesco Pesole said in a note.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 3, 2026
But Kamran Bokhari, senior fellow at the Middle East Policy Council, said Iran's economic struggles, which predate the war, could hamper efforts to fully rebuild military capability.
From BBC ● Jun. 11, 2026
There are Mesopotamian inscriptions referring to Venus that predate the time when Velikovsky says Venus changed from a comet into a planet.’
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
We don’t know for sure, but they may have arrived at this choice using logic that predates you.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 24, 2026
His tenure predates the formation of Inspire, becoming Arby’s CEO in 2013 after Roark first acquired the roast-beef sandwich chain.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 9, 2026
That fits a pattern which predates his spell in Germany.
From BBC ● Aug. 28, 2026
And as we get into subsequent episodes that we’re dealing with now, we see that Robby’s sense of loss predates Louie and his mentor, Adamson, and it goes back to almost an original sin.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
I don’t feel I’m being disloyal to Ben, only loyal to something else; which predates him, which has nothing to do with him.
From "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood
Digital waitlists predated COVID-19, of course, but for me, that was when the phone began to feel less like an option and more like a condition of dining out.
From Salon ● Oct. 17, 2026
Mandeep Singh, a senior industry analyst for technology at Bloomberg Intelligence, said worries about destructive AI predated large language models like Anthropic’s Claude.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 11, 2026
The company is also staring down lawsuits from people and school districts that predated the settlement and are set to go to trial soon, the Times reports.
From Slate ● Aug. 26, 2026
The arrival of both ships in America predated the English Civil War, which lasted from 1642 to 1651.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 10, 2026
But de Vries’s conjecture predated the molecular definition of the gene.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
“Notably lacking” were “educational philosophies predating the 20th century, or much focus on the elements and principles of classical liberal arts education.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 8, 2026
Google is already the subject of several formal DMA probes, and was hit with a massive 2.95 billion euro fine in September 2025 in an EU competition case predating the digital law.
From Barron's ● Apr. 27, 2026
On 13 March 2025, bulldozers demolished homes in Gishiri, an indigenous community predating the FCT.
From BBC ● Apr. 3, 2026
It lost $2 billion in 2001, with the vast majority of its problems predating the Sept. 11 attacks.
From Slate ● Nov. 24, 2025
Moreover, there was an even more elemental understanding implicitly codified in Philadelphia but actually predating the Constitutional Convention by many years.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
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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.
