provenance
/ˈpɹɒ.və.nəns/US/ˈpɹɑ.və.nəns/
provenance noun: place or source of origin.
Noun
provenance (countable and uncountable, plural provenances)
- Place or source of origin.
- Many supermarkets display the provenance of their food products.
- Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little.2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings...
- The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage notes below.
- This spear is of Viking provenance.
- Further support for the Shansi provenance came in 1965, when a bronze quadruped with identical ornamentation and of approximately the same size as the Freer example was unearthed in tomb 126, at Fen-shui-ling, Ch'ang-chih, Shansi Province.1982, Thomas Lawton, “Bronze Vessels, Fittings, and Weapons”, in Chinese Art of the Warring States Period, Smithsonian Institution, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 79, column 1
- The history of ownership of a work of art.
- The picture is of royal provenance.
- The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data used to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance).
- The execution history of computer processes which were used to compute a final piece of data (process provenance).
- Background; history; place of origin.
- Synonyms:
- ancestry
Verb
provenance (third-person singular simple present provenances, present participle provenancing, simple past and past participle provenanced)
- To establish the provenance of something
provenance meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali
provenance in Hindi
- प्रोवीनिंग
provenance in Tamil
- தோற்றமுதல்
provenance in Urdu
- ذریعہ
provenance in Bengali
- উৎস, প্রাপ্তিস্থান, মালিকানার ইতিহাস
More languagesFewer languages
- provenance in Telugu
- ప్రొవెన్సింగ్
- provenance in Malayalam
- ഉത്പത്തി, ഉത്ഭവം, ജന്മം, ഉറവിടം
- provenance in Kannada
- ಮೂಲಸ್ಥಳ, ಉಗಮಸ್ಥಾನ, ಉಗಮಸ್ಥಳ, ಮೂಲಸ್ಥಾನ
- provenance in Punjabi
- ਪ੍ਰੋਵੀਨਿੰਗ
- provenance in Persian
- سرمنشأ sar-manša'
Examples of provenance in a sentence
- Most of the provenanced pottery vessels were found in San Diego county middens.
- The auction house had a history of selling provenanced fine art.
- Sturzströme, irrespective of their provenance, have elements in common suggesting a ubiquitous mechanism of motion and emplacement.
Synonyms of provenance
Forms of provenance
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | provenances |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | provenances |
| present participle | provenancing |
| past participle | provenanced |
| past | provenanced |
Origin of provenance
Borrowed from French provenance (“origin”), from Middle French provenant, present participle of provenir (“come forth, arise”), from Latin provenio (“to come forth”).
Words formed from provenance
Phrases with provenance
Questions about provenance
- What does provenance mean?
- Provenance means place or source of origin.
- What is provenance in Hindi?
- Provenance in Hindi is प्रोवीनिंग. See Provenance meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is provenance?
- Provenance can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce provenance?
- Provenance is pronounced /ˈpɹɒ.və.nəns/ (UK).
- What is the plural of provenance?
- The plural of provenance is provenances.
Words near provenance in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: provenance (page history and authors); provenance (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); provenance (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); provenance (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); provenance (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); provenance (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); provenance (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); provenance (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); provenance (Punjabi, 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-provenance.wav.
Cite this entry: “provenance.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/provenance. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.