Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Of, relating to, or evolved from an ancestor or ancestors.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Pertaining to ancestors or progenitors; descending or claimed from ancestors: as, an ancestral estate; ancestral trees; a king on his ancestral throne.
- In biology, of or pertaining to an ancestor; being an earlier, and presumably lower or more generalized, type from which later more specialized forms of organized beings are asserted to have been evolved.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an
ancestor or ancestors; as, an ancestral estate.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective inherited or inheritable by established rules (usually legal rules) of descent
- adjective of or belonging to or inherited from an ancestor
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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They are now fighting to return to what they call their ancestral land.
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His earlier studies led him to formulate what he called the ancestral law.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 16 [Supplement] 1840-1916 1913
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The wide phylogenetic distribution suggests that signaling most likely evolved in ancestral eukaryotes.
A Tetrahymena Puzzle 2008
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The first of these resulted in ancestral Asu speakers settling into the South Pare Mountains and in proto-Sabaki speech communities spreading north of the Pangani River, along the narrow stretches of the Kenyan coast.
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The arc of Earth's limb appeared — immediately recognizable, as if coded in ancestral memory.
A Space in Time 2002
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The arc of Earth's limb appeared — immediately recognizable, as if coded in ancestral memory.
A Space in Time 2002
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Parents across the sea, rolling in ancestral gold and Bank of England notes, acquired a reality they had never enjoyed before.
The Second Chance 1910
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A slower legacy for Bruce Lee in Chinese ancestral town
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A slower legacy for Bruce Lee in Chinese ancestral town
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A slower legacy for Bruce Lee in Chinese ancestral town
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