ancestry
/ˈansɛstri
/noun (plural ancestries)
1One’s family or ethnic descent: he was proud of his Irish ancestry...
- A criollo in Argentina is a person or a family descended from Spanish ancestry, in other words, no added mixture of non-Spanish blood.
- Many of these families traced their ancestry to the earliest English settlers of this country's oldest fishing port.
- My father's family traces its ancestry there back 900 years.
Synonyms
ancestors, forebears, forefathers, progenitors, antecedents;
family tree;
lineage, line, descent, family, parentage, extraction, origin, derivation, genealogy, heredity, pedigree, blood, bloodline, stock, strain, roots
rare filiation, stirps
1.1The evolutionary or genetic line of descent of an animal or plant: the ancestry of the rose is extremely complicated...
- Evolutionists sought the ancestry of the tetrapods among the lobe-finned fishes.
- Lastly, Feduccia advocated the notion that convergent evolution may make the ancestry of birds unknowable.
- Humans did not evolve out of an animal ancestry.
2The origin or background of something: the book traces the ancestry of women’s poetry...
- I believe that reading children's pictorial books that depict the ancestry of different continents with children can make global education meaningful.
- This class is also called ‘tinkers’: whether this name has a common ancestry for both books or this is just a coincidence, I'm not sure.
- This is because the African Republic and the Islamic Union have a common ancestry that originated in Northern Africa several thousand years ago.
Origin
Middle English: alteration of Old French ancesserie, from ancestre (see ancestor).