ancestral

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.

   • an ancestral estate
   • one’s ancestral home
   • It seems that people with an ancestral history of enduring famines develop a tendency to store more body fat, becoming overfat even when they aren’t overweight.
2. 2

   An ancestor or forbear.

   • Some big cheese bein' grought back to his native island to get planted with his ancestrals.
   • I thought of the strange two-dimensional world these forebearing ancestrals had to live in.
3. 3

   A descendant of one's ancestors.

   • He considered that the local custom permitted a sister's son to inherit in default of near male ancestrals.
   • But ancestrals cannot be willed away .
   • Having no regards for their ancestrals and parents.
4. ›+ 7 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      An elderly relative.

      • Cadwy and some of the ancestrals carried Gilbert back to the platform to have his wounds healed by Guinevere.
   2. 5

      A genetic precursor.

      • All the ancestrals with unknown origin or pedigree were included within this group.
      • Some of the tequila ancestrals and añejos have a subdominant odor to them — the smoky, vanilla-like syringaldehyde that is also in coastal raicillas and bacanoras .
   3. 6

      A forerunner

      A forerunner; One who was involved in an earlier version of something.

      • It is hard, remember, to match the craft and proficiency of the ancestrals' bare-bones protocols of turning grapes into raisins, of mastering heat, dirt, and moisture to produce a natural and inexpensive candy.
      • Ancestrals were planters and irrigators, but more cosmopolitan.
   4. 7

      An earlier version of something.

   5. 8

      The spirit of one's ancestor.

      • Is not that article of the treaty relating to Christianity which, in condemning the worship of ancestrals, places itself in direct opposition to the fundamental law of the empire, a most flagrant interference in the affairs of the Chinese?
      • Only three of the 23 societies with such kinship groups lack active ancestrals. Half of the 24 societies without such kinship gropus posses active ancestral spirits.
      • The Guru then asked them that if their water could reach the sun or their ancestrals as they used to believe, why could his water not reach Kartarpur, which was far nearer than the sun.
   6. 9

      One who follows, honors, or is attracted to an ancestral tradition.

      • To future ancestrals living in old homesteads or in copies of them, Figures 2 and 3 indicate what and how to show.
   7. 10

      A relationship in which something is a precursor.

      • Like all ordinary ancestrals, remote successor is logically reflexive.
      • One can take advantage of the ancestrals of basic relations such as RemoteSuccessor, to define Quace structure as follows internal to Proposal A:
      • I thus naturally extend the notation introduced for the ancestrals of structural relations between arcs to the nonstructural relations Sponsor and Erase, and to relations defined in terms of them like Successor.

The neighborhood