Ancestry
nounA person's family or ethnic origins, traced through the line of people from whom they are descended.
How to spell ancestry
8 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce ancestry
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does ancestry mean?
- nounA person's family or ethnic origins, traced through the line of people from whom they are descended.
Ancestry in a sentence
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She researched her ancestry using old parish records and a genealogy website.
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The form asked applicants to describe their ancestry and place of birth.
Where does ancestry come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This word traces back to the Latin verb antecedere, meaning 'to go before', formed from ante 'before' and cedere 'to go' or 'to walk'. The Latin agent noun antecessor described a person who went before, in other words a predecessor or forerunner. Old French softened this into ancestre, which English borrowed in the 1200s as 'ancestor'. From the noun 'ancestor' English then built 'ancestry' by adding the collective suffix -ry, giving a word for one's line of descent or the body of people from whom one is descended. The same cedere root, meaning 'to go', still walks through everyday relatives such as 'precede', 'recede', and 'proceed', and remembering that family of words helps fix the c and the single s in the middle of the spelling.
How the word is built
- ancest- (from ancestor: one who goes before)
- -ry (noun suffix denoting condition or collective)
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