- preceding; prior: an antecedent event.
- a preceding circumstance, event, object, style, phenomenon, etc.
- antecedents,
- ancestors.
- the history, events, characteristics, etc., of one's earlier life: Little is known about his birth and antecedents.
- a word, phrase, or clause, usually a substantive, that is replaced by a pronoun or other substitute later, or occasionally earlier, in the same or in another, usually subsequent, sentence. In Jane lost a glove and she can't find it, Jane is the antecedent of she and glove is the antecedent of it.
- Mathematics.
- the first term of a ratio; the first or third term of a proportion.
- the first of two vectors in a dyad.
- the conditional element in a proposition, as “Caesar conquered Gaul,” in “If Caesar conquered Gaul, he was a great general.”
- an event, circumstance, etc, that happens before another
- a word or phrase to which a pronoun refers. In the sentence "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," people is the antecedent of who
- the hypothetical clause, usually introduced by "if", in a conditional statement: that which implies the other
- maths an obsolescent name for numerator (def. 1)
- the fallacy of inferring the falsehood of the consequent of a conditional statement, given the truth of the conditional and the falsehood of its antecedent, as if there are five of them, there are more than four: there are not five, so there are not more than four
- preceding in time or order; prior
