1 a person in your family who lived a long time ago:
His ancestors had come to America from Ireland.
SYNFOREBEAR
2 an animal that lived in the past which a modern animal has developed from:
a reptile that was the common ancestor of lizards and turtles
3 an early form of a machine which later became more developed
SYNFORERUNNER:
The ancestor of the modern bicycle was called a penny-farthing.
compareDESCENDANT
ancestral adjective:
her ancestral home (= that had belonged to her ancestors and that she had inherited from them)
Rate this entry
About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for ancestor is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is ancestor a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, ancestor is tagged as noun.
Does ancestor appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — ancestor appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
