Word.ws English Dictionary

ancestral

US/ænˈsɛs.təɹ.əl/

ancestral adjective: of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.

Adjective

ancestral (not comparable)

  1. Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.
    • an ancestral estate
    • one’s ancestral home

Noun

ancestral (plural ancestrals)

  1. An ancestor or forbear.
    • Some big cheese bein' grought back to his native island to get planted with his ancestrals.1955, Harry Chandler Elliott, Reprieve from Paradise, page 147
    • I thought of the strange two-dimensional world these forebearing ancestrals had to live in.2006, Scott Dikkers, Peter Hilleren, Destined for Destiny, page 23
  2. (India) A descendant of one's ancestors.
    • He considered that the local custom permitted a sister's son to inherit in default of near male ancestrals.1868, The Punjab Record - Volume 3, page 58
    • But ancestrals cannot be willed away .1921, Jagannath Raghunath Gharpure, Principles of Hindu Law, page 390
  3. An elderly relative.
    • Cadwy and some of the ancestrals carried Gilbert back to the platform to have his wounds healed by Guinevere.2018, R. C. Jette, The Elfdins and the Gold Temple: An Oralee Chronicle
  4. A genetic precursor.
    • The intermediate nature of the gene frequencies of the populations in the two groupings to those of the putative ancestrals, Table 4, indicates the Mestizo gentic constitution of the MMA populations and supports previous information for this area (Garza-Chapa 1983b)1987, Human Biology - Volume 59, Issues 1-3 - 4, page 44
    • All the ancestrals with unknown origin or pedigree were included within this group.1993, Jorge Enrique Autrique, Molecular Markers Applied to Wheat Improvement, page 33
  5. A forerunner; One who was involved in an earlier version of something.
    • It is hard, remember, to match the craft and proficiency of the ancestrals' bare-bones protocols of turning grapes into raisins, of mastering heat, dirt, and moisture to produce a natural and inexpensive candy.1996, Victor Davis Hanson, Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea, page 25
    • Ancestrals were planters and irrigators, but more cosmopolitan.2015, Allan Hayes, John Blom, Carol Hayes, Southwestern Pottery: Anasazi to Zuni
  6. An earlier version of something.
    • The old ancestrals of the Murray were disrupted and caused to flow along the Gulpa Creek at the toe of the fault escarpment to Deniliquin (Pels 1966). Later the younger ancestrals followed the old for a short distance beyond Tocumwal, left them and formed the Bullatale Creek flood plain.1978, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria - Volume 90, page 75
    • The Internet was and is, an invention of academics, researchers, including the ones of the military phase. It is still the first anarchy in power (a limited but not negligible disuised power) with well known ancestrals in other fields and ideologies, like the Commune or, less in the anarchic field...2013, Suzanne Bakker, Health Information Management: What Strategies?
  7. The spirit of one's ancestor.
    • Is not that article of the treaty relating to Christianity which, in condemning the worship of ancestrals, places itself in direct opposition to the fundamental law of the empire, a most flagrant interference in the affairs of the Chinese?1872, USA House of Representatives, House Documents - Volume 18; Volume 267, page 165
    • Only three of the 23 societies with such kinship groups lack active ancestrals. Half of the 24 societies without such kinship gropus posses active ancestral spirits.1960, Guy E. Swanson, The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs, page 103
  8. One who follows, honors, or is attracted to an ancestral tradition.
    • To future ancestrals living in old homesteads or in copies of them, Figures 2 and 3 indicate what and how to show.1928, Antiques: A Magazine for Collectors - Volumes 13-14, page 530
    • The DC [District Commissioner] reasoned that since it was only the ancestrals who had a problem with the incident, they should supply the bulls necessary to purify the forest. The ancestrals refused, since they did not want to pay for an offence of the Christian group.2011, Emily Boyd, Carl Folke, Adapting Institutions, page 62
  9. A relationship in which something is a precursor.
    • Like all ordinary ancestrals, remote successor is logically reflexive.1992, Diane Brentari, Gary N. Larson, Lynn A. MacLeod, The Joy of Grammar: A festschrift in honor of James D. McCawley, page 309
    • One can take advantage of the ancestrals of basic relations such as RemoteSuccessor, to define Quace structure as follows internal to Proposal A:2004, Paul Martin Postal, Skeptical Linguistic Essays, page 61

ancestral meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Telugu

ancestral in Hindi

pertaining to ancestors
पैतृक paitŕk

ancestral in Tamil

மூதாதையரினது, வழிவந்த, மூதாதைய, முன்னோருக்குரிய, மூதாதையர்களுக்குச் சொந்தமான, முன்னோர் மரபில் வந்த

ancestral in Urdu

آبائی, جدی, پدری

ancestral in Telugu

pertaining to ancestors
పిత్రార్జితము pitrārjitamu
More languagesFewer languages
ancestral in Malayalam
പെെതൃക, പെെതൃകം, പിതൃ, പിതുരാർജ്ജിതം
ancestral in Sanskrit
पित्र्य pítrya, पूर्विन् pūrvin
ancestral in Nepali
पैतृक

Examples of ancestral in a sentence

  • It seems that people with an ancestral history of enduring famines develop a tendency to store more body fat, becoming overfat even when they aren’t overweight.2025 June 17, Shane Duquette, Marco Walker-Ng, “What is Skinny Fat? And How to Know If You Are”, in Bony to Beastly, archived from the...
  • Moreover, the superior ancestrals associated with Plymouth Rock (the Pilgrim Fathers) and Mt.2007, Michael R. Ott, The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, page 145:
  • Having no regards for their ancestrals and parents.1946, Sino-Indian Studies - Volume 2, Part 1, page 19:
  • Some of the tequila ancestrals and añejos have a subdominant odor to them — the smoky, vanilla-like syringaldehyde that is also in coastal raicillas and bacanoras .2023, Gary Paul Nabhan, David Suro Piñera, Agave Spirits: The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals:

All 40 example sentences with ancestral

Forms of ancestral

Adjective
alternative form (obsolete)ancestrall
alternative form (obsolete)auncestral
Noun
pluralancestrals

Origin of ancestral

From Anglo-Norman ancestrel, from ancestre (“ancestor”), equivalent to ancestor + -al.

Words formed from ancestral

Phrases with ancestral

Questions about ancestral

What does ancestral mean?
Ancestral means of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.
What is ancestral in Hindi?
Ancestral in Hindi is पैतृक (paitŕk). See Ancestral meaning in Hindi.
How do you use ancestral in a sentence?
It seems that people with an ancestral history of enduring famines develop a tendency to store more body fat, becoming overfat even when they aren’t overweight.
What part of speech is ancestral?
Ancestral can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce ancestral?
Ancestral is pronounced /ænˈsɛs.təɹ.əl/ (US).

Words near ancestral in the dictionary

  1. Ancestors' Day
  2. ancestorship
  3. ancestorships
  4. ancestour
  5. ancestours
  6. ancestral
  7. ancestral chart
  8. ancestral charts
  9. ancestral hall
  10. ancestral halls
  11. ancestral name

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ancestral (page history and authors); ancestral (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ancestral (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ancestral (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); पित्र्य (Sanskrit) (page history and authors); ancestral (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-ancestral.wav.

Cite this entry: “ancestral.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ancestral. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.