ANTECEDENTS Synonyms: 69 Similar and Opposite Words

antecedents

noun

Definition of antecedents next

plural of antecedent

as in causes

someone or something responsible for a result what are the antecedents of the American Revolutionary War?

Synonyms & Similar Words

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

as in forerunners

something belonging to an earlier time from which something else was later developed the typewriter is the antecedent of the computer keyboard

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Recent Examples of antecedents Many musical and social antecedents are responsible for its birth. —

Literary Hub, 17 Feb. 2026 Went on to tackle malaria, and that process created both huge successes in modern public health, but also seeded the American public health system county by county across this country, and presented the antecedents of the Centers for Disease Control based in Atlanta. —

Christopher Dilella, CNBC, 17 Feb. 2026 The goal was to link American culture with its European antecedents—a heady way to justify shedding blood for another continent’s conflict. —

Colton Valentine, New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2026 For Ann Lee, an arthouse musical that counts among its closest antecedents Robert Eggers’ The Witch and the Björk-starring Dancer in the Dark, Blumberg reworked and retrofitted 10 traditional Shaker hymns, and recorded Seyfried and the other actors live on set. —

Walden Green, Pitchfork, 22 Jan. 2026 My poem works by multisequencing; in each of the three book-sections there are four narratives, and the reader must gather each piece of the narrative as it unspools and connect it to its antecedents—that yields compression. —

Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books, 23 Oct. 2025 The parallel plotlines involving Ali’s possible descendants and problematic antecedents, including a father (Ercan Kesal) who seems to be particularly abusive towards his wife, collide in highly unusual ways during the movie’s volatile second half. —

Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 Jan. 2025 Art-wise, there are antecedents. —

Todd Martens, Los Angeles Times, 23 Jan. 2025 Seeing around the bend in the river—or even knowing the river ahead does indeed bend—can require the sort of leap of faith that made Vannevar Bush insist that shamans, priests and spiritual seers are the antecedents of today’s engineering stars. —

IEEE Spectrum, 8 Aug. 2019

Recent Examples of Synonyms for antecedents

Noun

Throughout the case, the companies insisted that there is no scientific proof that social media causes mental health issues, suggesting that they are being used as a scapegoat for the multi-faceted emotional issues children face that can have many root causes.

— Bobby Allyn, NPR, 25 Mar. 2026
Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Niger are among those that will see such deaths exceeding those from stroke, one of the top causes of death across the globe, research from the nonprofit group Climate Impact Lab found.

— Preeti Jha, semafor.com, 25 Mar. 2026