antecedence

Noun

antecedence (countable and uncountable, plural antecedences)

1. The relationship of preceding something in time or order.
   • […] your […] darke argument […] is this breifly in fewe wordes. The office […] of charite is to geue life ergo charitie iustifieth. […] But what and if I denye your antecedence, and proue it by scripture, that faith and not loue is the lyfe of the iustified.1546, George Joye, The Refutation of the Byshop of Winchesters Derke Declaration of His False Articles, London: J. Herford, page lxi
   • […] whereas there is no other Felicity of Beasts, but the enjoying of their quotidian Food, Ease, and Lusts; as having little, or no foresight of the time to come, for want of observation, and memory of the order, consequence, and dependance of the things they see; Man observeth how one Event hath...1651, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London: Andrew Crooke, “Of Man,” Chapter 12, p. 52

   Synonyms:

   precedence, priority, antecedency, anteriority

   Antonyms:

   subsequence, posteriority, posteriorness, succession

2. That which precedes something or someone (e.g. prior events, origin, ancestry).
   • […] it is pleasantly notable […] with what desperate intensity, vigilance, and fierceness Madame watches over all his interests, and liabilities, and casualties great and small, leaping with her whole force into M. de Voltaire’s scale of the balance, careless of antecedences and consequences alike...1858, Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich the Second, New York: Harper, Volume 2, Book 10, Chapter 2, p. 461
   • The literature on the French Revolution and its antecedence is vast.1988, Rupert Christiansen, Romantic Affinities, New York: Putnam, page 253
3. The length of time by which one event or time period precedes another.
   • The average antecedence of spring phenomena at Carlton House to their occurrence at Cumberland House is between a fortnight and three weeks.1851, John Richardson, Arctic Searching Expedition, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, Volume 2, Appendix, No. 2, pp. 239-240
   • […] the following year would have shown an antecedence of the conciliar year over the civil of […] fourteen days.1949, William Scott Ferguson, “Orgeonika” in Commemorative Studies in Honor of Theodore Leslie Shear, Hesperia Supplement VIII, reprint, Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1975, p. 146
4. The relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent.
   • Sometimes this defect amounts to a blundering obliviousness of all antecedence. The following tearful reproof was given by a judge of the State of New York to a prisoner just convicted: “[…] nature has endowed you with a good education and respectable family connections, instead of which you go...1895, Austin Phelps, Henry Allyn Frink, chapter 13, in Rhetoric: Its Theory and Practice, New York: Scribner, page 109
   • The pronouns who and which and what, used interrogatively, […] may refer to a word or to words in the answer to a question, but their antecedence may be indefinite or unrevealed, even after the answer is given.1941, John B. Opdycke, Harper’s English Grammar, New York: Popular Library, published 1965, Part 1, Chapter 2, p. 52
5. A geologic process that explains how and why antecedent rivers can cut through mountain systems instead of going around them.
   • Speculation as to how the Green River established its course across the Uinta Mountains led Powell to introduce such terms as “superposition” and “antecedence” to identify processes by which streams are able to establish and maintain courses across mountain barriers.2005, Wallace R. Hansen, The Geologic Story of the Uinta Mountains, Guilford, CT: Falcon, 2nd ed., p. 26
6. (obsolete) An apparent motion of a planet toward the west.

   Synonyms:

   retrogradation