ancestor

American  

[an-ses-ter, -suh-ster] / ˈæn sɛs tər, -sə stər /

noun

• ancestors
  plural

1. a person from whom one is descended; forebear; progenitor.

2. Biology. the actual or hypothetical form or stock from which an organism has developed or descended.

3. an object, idea, style, or occurrence serving as a prototype, forerunner, or inspiration to a later one.

   The balloon is an ancestor of the modern dirigible.

4. a person who serves as an influence or model for another; one from whom mental, artistic, spiritual, etc., descent is claimed.

   a philosophical ancestor.

5. Law. a person from whom an heir derives an inheritance.

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ancestor British  

/ ˈænsɛstə /

noun

1. (often plural) a person from whom another is directly descended, esp someone more distant than a grandparent; forefather

2. an early type of animal or plant from which a later, usually dissimilar, type has evolved

3. a person or thing regarded as a forerunner of a later person or thing

   the ancestor of the modern camera

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• ancestress
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• ancestors
  plural

Etymology

Origin of ancestor

1250–1300; Middle English ancestre < Old French (with t developed between s and r ) < Latin antecessor antecessor

Explanation

An ancestor came before. Your grandmother's grandmother and any relative before her is one of your ancestors. Ante-, a common Latin prefix, means "before." Cedere is Latin for "to go." So, an ancestor is someone who has gone before us. Evolutionary biologists have advanced the theory that all life on earth descends from a common ancestor. Ancestor can also mean "prototype" or "forerunner." The abacus is a distant ancestor of today's supercomputers.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

ancestor ancestors

It is unclear exactly how the sculpture came to be in the Cotswolds, but the family presume it was bought at auction by an ancestor in the mid 1900s.

From BBC ● Sep. 15, 2026

Thanks to an ancestor who wished to never feel the agony of love again, any man the Owens women fall in love with ends up dead.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2026

She arrived a few days before Día de los Muertos, a day of ancestor veneration in Mexican states like Michoacan, Jalisco and Oaxaca.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2026

A human, an octopus, and a coral may appear to have almost nothing in common, but their chromosomes still contain recognizable fragments inherited from an animal ancestor that lived more than 600 million years ago.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 25, 2026

“Two cows for a man’s life? Two cows for depriving someone of becoming an ancestor? Is it any wonder his spirit has returned in the form of a leopard?”

From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer

And now, be the latest node in a transmission that includes Ka, his parents and grandparents, and the ancestors he never knew, but whose wisdom he inherited.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 7, 2026

Grange said it could pave the way for a "long outstanding settlement for the hundreds of years of the most horrific abuse that our African ancestors endured".

From BBC ● Sep. 6, 2026

Our Western and Christian ancestors aimed to create a society in which people could flourish and pursue virtue.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 1, 2026

But as political analyst Mona Charen noted, “his children are the product of a marriage between himself and the daughter of recent immigrants. Her ancestors are buried in India. Is that their ‘homeland’?

From Salon ● Aug. 30, 2026

How am I supposed to toss away the songs our ancestors passed on to us from the time they fled Spain?

From "Across So Many Seas" by Ruth Behar

Related Words

• forebear
• forefather
• founder