prehistory
noun
Forms prehistories pre-history
- noun The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.
- noun The study of those times.
- noun (humorous, hyperbolic) Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.
- noun (often as pre-history) The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.
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Antonyms
Etymology
From pre- (“before”) + history, first attested in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836, after the model of prehistoric, from French préhistorique.
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 — from the Wiktionary entry “prehistory”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details