Ancients

How to spell ancients

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ancients

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ancients mean?

1. nounPeople who lived in the distant past, especially the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome.

Ancients in a sentence

• The ancients built roads that still survive today.

• Scholars study how the ancients understood the stars.

Where does ancients come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the Latin ante, meaning 'before', which gave rise to the Late Latin anteanus, describing something that came earlier in time. That form softened in Old French into ancien, meaning 'old' or 'former', and English adopted it during the 1300s as 'ancient'. From the adjective came the noun use, and the plural 'ancients' settled into a special sense: the peoples of long-vanished civilisations, above all the Greeks and Romans whose writings later generations studied. The spelling preserves the French -cien shape, which is why the 'sci' sounds like a simple 'sh', and the t before the s is silent, two reasons the word trips up writers who spell by ear.

How the word is built

• anci- (from Latin ante: before)
• -ent (adjective/noun ending)
• -s (plural)