Word.ws English Dictionary

yester-year

yester-year is the alternative spelling of yesteryear.

Meaning of yesteryear

Noun

yesteryear (countable and uncountable, plural yesteryears)

  1. (poetic) Past years; time gone by; yore.
    • To be old here, is to be respectable, and time-honored is the epithet most coveted. You see no sign of the doings of yesterday or yesteryear: the new is careful of obtruding itself, and comes into the world under matronage of the old.1840 August 2, George H[enry] Calvert, Scenes and Thoughts in Europe. […], New York, N.Y.: Wiley and Putnam, published 1846, page 5
    Synonyms:
    foretime
  2. (rare) Last year.

See all 3 meanings of yesteryear

Forms of yester-year

pluralyester-years

Phrases with yester-year

Questions about yester-year

What is yester-year the alternative spelling of?
Yester-year is the alternative spelling of yesteryear.

Words near yester-year in the dictionary

  1. yester-millennium
  2. yester-minute
  3. yester-month
  4. yester-morrow
  5. yester-morrows
  6. yester-year
  7. yester-years
  8. yestercentury
  9. yesterdawn
  10. yesterdawns
  11. yesterday

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yester-year (page history and authors); yesteryear (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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Cite this entry: “yester-year.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/yester-year. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.