| / English Dictionary |
PREHISTORIC
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
No longer fashionable
Example:
my mother has these prehistoric ideas about proper clothes
Classified under:
Similar:
unfashionable; unstylish (not in accord with or not following current fashion)
Domain usage:
colloquialism (a colloquial expression; characteristic of spoken or written communication that seeks to imitate informal speech)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Belonging to or existing in times before recorded history
Example:
prehistoric peoples
Synonyms:
prehistoric; prehistorical
Classified under:
Similar:
past (earlier than the present time; no longer current)
Derivation:
prehistory (the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of the written word)
Sense 3
Meaning:
Of or relating to times before written history
Example:
prehistoric archeology
Classified under:
Relational adjectives (pertainyms)
Pertainym:
prehistory (the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of the written word)
Derivation:
prehistory (the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of the written word)
Context examples:
We have to bear in mind, remarked Summerlee, that there are many prehistoric forms which have never come down to us.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
The intense prehistoric hurricanes were fueled in part by warmer sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean than have been the norm off the U.S. East Coast over the last few hundred years.
(Monster hurricanes struck U.S. Northeast during prehistoric periods of ocean warming, NSF)
Our professors would gladly have stayed there all day, so entranced were they by this opportunity of studying the life of a prehistoric age.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Setting aside these entirely new forms of life, the plateau was very rich in known prehistoric forms, dating back in some cases to early Jurassic times.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which prehistoric animals were to be found.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Whatever path the lecturer took amid the wilds of the past seemed invariably to lead him to some assertion as to extinct or prehistoric life which instantly brought the same bulls' bellow from the Professor.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I do not speak upon this subject as an amateur, nor, I may add, as a popular lecturer, but I speak as one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere closely to facts, when I say that Mr. Waldron is very wrong in supposing that because he has never himself seen a so-called prehistoric animal, therefore these creatures no longer exist.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I knew little of prehistoric life, but I had a clear remembrance of one book which I had read in which it spoke of creatures who would live upon our lions and tigers as a cat lives upon mice.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Thus, then, friend Mac in his report: The much-discussed meeting of the Zoological Institute, convened to hear the report of the Committee of Investigation sent out last year to South America to test the assertions made by Professor Challenger as to the continued existence of prehistoric life upon that Continent, was held last night in the greater Queen's Hall, and it is safe to say that it is likely to be a red letter date in the history of Science, for the proceedings were of so remarkable and sensational a character that no one present is ever likely to forget them.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
We have been privileged to overhear a prehistoric tragedy, the sort of drama which occurred among the reeds upon the border of some Jurassic lagoon, when the greater dragon pinned the lesser among the slime, said Challenger, with more solemnity than I had ever heard in his voice.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
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