Contextualizebeta

prehistory

noun

Etymology

From pre- (“before”) + history, first attested in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836, after the model of prehistoric, from French préhistorique.

  1. derived from *weyd-✻
  2. derived from ἱστορίᾱ
  3. derived from historia
  4. derived from estoire
  5. inherited from historie
  6. formed as prehistory — “pre- + history”

Definitions

  1. The time before written records in any area of the world

    The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.

    • “We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”

  2. The study of those times.

  3. Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.

    • I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.
  4. ›+ 1 more definition

    1. The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.

      • Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for prehistory. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA