antecedent
先例,前事,前事之师,前身
Related Words
Definitions
- 1
- : preceding; prior: an antecedent event.
- 1
- : a preceding circumstance, event, object, style, phenomenon, etc.
- : antecedents, ancestors. the history, events, characteristics, etc., of one's earlier life: Little is known about his birth and antecedents.
- : Grammar. a word, phrase, or clause, usually a substantive, that is replaced by a pronoun or other substitute later, or occasionally earlier, in the same or in another, usually subsequent, sentence. In Jane lost a glove and she can't find it, Jane is the antecedent of she and glove is the antecedent of it.
- : Mathematics. the first term of a ratio; the first or third term of a proportion.the first of two vectors in a dyad.
- : Logic. the conditional element in a proposition, as “Caesar conquered Gaul,” in “If Caesar conquered Gaul, he was a great general.”
Synonyms & Antonyms
Examples
Powers’s thoroughly modern fable of environmental mourning hardly needs to dredge up that cringeworthy antecedent.
I’ve lived hereabout all my life but, for most of that time, it would be fair to say that I’ve never concerned myself with the tribulations of long-dead antecedents.
Much like the blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping, pedophilic cabal of QAnon’s theories, the Prokopian antecedent demonstrates a mixing of political critique with the supernatural and the erotic.
Even online chat rooms have an antecedent in the exchanges of nineteenth-century American telegraph operators.
If the riots have any comparable antecedent, it's the violence that took over French towns and cities in the fall of 2005.
The nature both of this substance and the antecedent substance from which it is derived is not known.
Spencer tells us that it is 'absolutely antecedent to all relative experience whatever.'
In this line and the next the attributive clauses are separated from the antecedent: see note, l. 2.
Law and antecedent necessity to Mr. Mill are one and the same.
To a scientist there is nothing more in it than antecedent and consequent.