Prehistory

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times. countable, uncountable

    "“We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”"

  2. 2
    the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of the written word wordnet
  3. 3
    The study of those times. countable, uncountable
  4. 4
    Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era. countable, excessive, humorous, uncountable

    "I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history."

  5. 5
    The history leading up to some event, condition, etc. countable, often, uncountable

    "Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories."

Synonyms

All synonyms
chronicleprehistoric ageprehistoric culture

Example

More examples

"By the 23rd century, the Transplantation Theory, which postulated that alien genes were combined with human genes during prehistory, ameliorated the already established Evolution Theory of humanity."

Etymology

From pre- (“before”) + history, first attested in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836, after the model of prehistoric, from French préhistorique.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.