Ancient

How to spell ancient

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ancient

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ancient mean?

1. adjectiveBelonging to the very distant past, or extremely old.

Ancient in a sentence

• The museum displayed pottery from an ancient civilisation.

• Archaeologists uncovered the ruins of an ancient city beneath the field.

Where does ancient come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the 1300s from Old French ancien, meaning 'old' or 'former', which grew out of the Vulgar Latin anteanus, a word built on the Latin ante, meaning simply 'before'. The idea behind it is that something ancient is something that came long before our own time. The unexpected letter 't' at the end of the modern English spelling was not there in the French original; it crept in during the late Middle Ages, probably by analogy with words that genuinely end in -ent, such as 'present' and 'absent', and that intrusive 't' is exactly the spelling trap that survives today. The same Latin ante also gave us words like 'anterior', meaning placed in front, and 'antecedent', meaning something that went before. Over the centuries 'ancient' narrowed from a general sense of 'old' to its modern association with the distant past, particularly the early civilisations of history.

How the word is built

• anci- (from Latin ante: before)
• -ent (adjectival suffix)