adjective
noun
Other Word Forms
- ancestrally adverb
- nonancestral adjective
- nonancestrally adverb
- pseudoancestral adjective
- pseudoancestrally adverb
Etymology
Origin of ancestral
1425–75; late Middle English aunce ( s ) trel < Middle French, equivalent to ancestre ancestor + -el -al 1
Explanation
Ancestral things have been around so long that they once belonged to your ancestors, the family members who lived before your grandparents were born. Your ancestral home is the place your great-grandparents or great-great-uncle once lived. You can also use this adjective to describe things that someone inherited from ancestors, like your friend's ancestral beach cottage or your mom's ancestral set of silverware. Ancestral comes from the Late Latin antecessor, "predecessor," or literally "forgoer," from the root antecedere, "to precede."
Vocabulary lists containing ancestral
"Earthquake"
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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.
Like other members of the diaspora, they retain strong ties to India, with many regularly travelling to visit their families or ancestral homes.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 18, 2026
“There are a lot of politics around the Persian origin,” said Al Hussein, who is Emirati of ancestral Persian origin.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 1, 2026
Their loved one's ashes are placed inside and the space turned into an ancestral shrine.
From BBC • Mar. 31, 2026
By comparing how these gene clusters are arranged across hundreds of plant genomes and tracing their patterns from ancestral species to modern plants, they were able to detect conserved elements that earlier methods had missed.
From Science Daily • Mar. 14, 2026
Thus, the evidence derived from plant names in modern African languages permits us to glimpse the existence of three languages being spoken in Africa thousands of years ago: ancestral Nilo-Saharan, ancestral Niger-Congo, and ancestral Afroasiatic.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Definitions 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.
