Word.ws English Dictionary

proleptic

/pɹoʊˈlɛptɪk/

proleptic adjective: extrapolated to dates prior to its first adoption; of those used to adjust to or from the Julian calendar or Gregorian calendar.

Adjective

proleptic (comparative more proleptic, superlative most proleptic)

  1. Extrapolated to dates prior to its first adoption; of those used to adjust to or from the Julian calendar or Gregorian calendar.
    • The Julian proleptic calendar is formed by applying the rules of the Julian calendar to times before Caesar's reform, and the Julian date (JD) specifies the particular instant of a day by ending the Julian day number with the fraction of the day elapsed since the preceding Greenwich noon.1999, Kenneth R. Lang, Astrophysical Formulae: Space, Time, Matter and Cosmology, volume II, Springer, →ISBN, page 70
    • The proleptic Gregorian calendar is produced by extending the Gregorian calendar backwards to dates preceding its official introduction in 1582.2018, Ian Chivers, Jane Sleightholme, Introduction to Programming with Fortran, Springer, →ISBN, page 535
  2. Anticipatory; prescient or forward-looking.
    • A far-seeing or proleptic wisdom.1844, Thomas De Quincey, “Greece Under the Romans”, in Blackwood's Magazine
    • In contrast with physical death, spiritual death might be called metaphorical. It becomes proleptic when contrasted with the second and final death.1892, Emmanuel Pétavel-Olliff, The Problem of Immortality, page 208
  3. Exhibiting or pertaining to prolepsis (any sense)
    • a 'proleptic' epithet describing the result of the hunt, means literally 'with leafage broken' and is formed from the stem of ἀγνύναι.1904, Aeschylus, Arthur Woollgar Verrall, The 'Agamemnon' of Aeschylus, page 90
    • There was no proleptic suffix in Moabite, according to the present evidence.1985, W. Randall Garr, Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E, page 168

Noun

proleptic (plural proleptics)

  1. The placement of an element in a syntactic unit before that to which it would logically correspond.
  2. Information about the outcome of a story placed near the beginning.
  3. A lateral branch that develops from a lateral meristem, after the formation of a bud or following a period of dormancy, when the lateral meristem is split from a terminal meristem.
  4. Something that predicts or implies the future or outcome.

proleptic meaning in Kannada

proleptic in Kannada

ಮುಂಭಾವನೆಯ, ಸಮಾಧಾನ ರೂಪದ, ಸಂಭಾವ್ಯಾಕ್ಷೇಪ, ಪೂರ್ವಸಿದ್ಧ ರೂಪದ

Examples of proleptic in a sentence

  • The .NET epoch is midnight at the start of January 1st, AD 1, although that's AD 1 in a proleptic Gregorian calendar, which refers to even more complexity we haven't talked about yet.2022, Tomasz Lelek, Jon Skeet, Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs: How to Make Good Programming Decisions, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 155:
  • In World Two, Jesus can be seen as the proleptic event, giving promise of God's vindication of creation in and through history.1989, W. Paul Jones, Theological Worlds, Nashville: Abingdon Press, page 151:
  • In a world of youth idolatry, we easily lose our proleptic quality after the first peak, and become regressive, looking back toward the peaks already passed.1995, John S. Murphy, Frederic M. Hudson, The Joy of Old: A Guide to Successful Elderhood, page 41:
  • 8) Be proleptic, a word that comes from the Greek for “anticipation.” That is, get the better of the major objection to your argument by raising and answering it in advance.2017 August 26, Bret Stephens, “Tips for Aspiring Op-Ed Writers”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Forms of proleptic

Adjective
comparativemore proleptic
superlativemost proleptic
Noun
pluralproleptics

Origin of proleptic

From prolepsis (“anticipation”) + -ic.

Questions about proleptic

What does proleptic mean?
Proleptic means extrapolated to dates prior to its first adoption; of those used to adjust to or from the Julian calendar or Gregorian calendar.
What is proleptic in Kannada?
Proleptic in Kannada is ಮುಂಭಾವನೆಯ, ಸಮಾಧಾನ ರೂಪದ, ಸಂಭಾವ್ಯಾಕ್ಷೇಪ. See Proleptic meaning in Kannada.
How do you use proleptic in a sentence?
The .NET epoch is midnight at the start of January 1st, AD 1, although that's AD 1 in a proleptic Gregorian calendar, which refers to even more complexity we haven't talked about yet.
What part of speech is proleptic?
Proleptic can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce proleptic?
Proleptic is pronounced /pɹoʊˈlɛptɪk/.

Words near proleptic in the dictionary

  1. prolene
  2. proleniency
  3. prolentiviral
  4. prolepses
  5. prolepsis
  6. proleptic
  7. proleptic Julian calendar
  8. proleptical
  9. proleptically
  10. proleptics
  11. proles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: proleptic (page history and authors); proleptic (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). 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-proleptic.wav.

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