Archive
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A place for storing earlier, and often historical, material. An archive usually contains documents (letters, records, newspapers, etc.) or other types of media kept for historical interest.
"“I don’t know how one could be interested in libraries and not archives,” Lannon told me. They tell you “the stories behind things,” he said, “the unpublished, the hard to find, the true story."
- 2 a depository containing historical records and documents wordnet
- 3 The material so kept, considered as a whole (compare archives).
"His archive of Old High German texts is the most extensive in Britain."
- 4 Natural deposits of material, regarded as a record of environmental changes over time.
"soil archive"
- 1 To place (something) into an archive. transitive
"I was planning on archiving the documents from 2001."
- 2 put into an archive wordnet
Example
More examples"The company faced a major interruption in business when a fire destroyed their archive of computer hard drives and optical discs."
Etymology
First appears c. 1603 in a translation by Philemon Holland. From French archive(s), from Latin archīvum, from Ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον (arkheîon, “town hall”).
Related phrases
More for "archive"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.