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:
Meanwhile, some of the victories the division has claimed predate its work.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 14, 2026
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
South Africa's laws prohibiting hate speech and incitement to violence mostly predate modern social media platforms, said Kimal Harvey, an attorney at the Legal Resources Centre.
From Barron's ● Jun. 19, 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
"The BBC will bring it back because it's an old brand, it predates us by decades," Hammond said.
From BBC ● Oct. 29, 2026
Miller says she has a new appreciation for any piece of writing that predates ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, and for words that an LLM would be unlikely to spit out.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 30, 2026
We don’t know for sure, but they may have arrived at this choice using logic that predates you.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 24, 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
The fact that the source of this expression predates Newton and was picked up by him for his own purposes only reinforces Faulkner’s compelling argument.
From "The Scientists" by John Gribbin
The erosion also predated the war, which began in late February.
From Barron's ● Nov. 4, 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
As I reported in 2019, many of those arrangements turned out to be exaggerated or bogus, or predated Trump’s claim.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 13, 2026
Hickman, now owned by meatpacking giant JBS and Brazilian egg supplier Mantiqueira, said the alleged conduct predated their late-2025 acquisition of the company, but that the settlement resolves all allegations.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 1, 2026
The creditor’s note was purportedly signed by Roan and was dated “Jany, 1921”; this was important, because it indicated that the note predated efforts to obtain the insurance, giving legitimacy to Hale’s claim.
From "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann
“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
The play, which takes place in the period predating smartphones, offers a microcosm of American life, not unlike the Grover’s Corners of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” before our brains were all rewired.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 29, 2026
It lost $2 billion in 2001, with the vast majority of its problems predating the Sept. 11 attacks.
From Slate ● Nov. 24, 2025
Survey response rates have dramatically declined External link in recent years, predating the Covid-19 pandemic.
From Barron's ● Oct. 14, 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.
