prehistory
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From pre- (“before”) + history, first attested in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836,[1] after the model of prehistoric, from French préhistorique.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]prehistory (countable and uncountable, plural prehistories)
- The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.
- Synonym: prehistoric age
- 2014 September 29, Douglas Quenqua, “Toolmaking May Have Risen Independently”, in The New York Times[2]:
- “We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”
- The study of those times.
- (humorous, hyperbolic) Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.
- 1984, Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth, page 25:
- I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.
- (often as pre-history) The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.
- 1931 July 25, Time & Tide, page 893:
- Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.
Antonyms
[edit]Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]era before written records
|
study of events and conditions before written records
|
history of events leaving up to something
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References
[edit]- “prehistory, n.”, in OED Online
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
