From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishantecedentan‧te‧ced‧ent /ˌæntəˈsiːdənt/ noun [countable] 1 formalBEFORE an event, organization, or thing that is similar to the one you have mentioned but existed earlier historical antecedents2 → antecedents3 SL technical a word, phrase, or sentence that is represented by another word, for example a pronoun —antecedent adjective
Examples from the Corpus
antecedent• The Byrds are seen as an antecedent of bands like R.E.M.• Education business partnerships, though recent in their current form, have antecedents which it would be foolish to ignore.• Once the antecedents to their overdrinking are established, clients can begin to make systematic changes in these situational factors.• There were three distinctive characteristics about the archosaurs that paleontologists discovered marked them off from their antecedents.Origin antecedent (1300-1400) Latin present participle of antecedere, from ante- ( → ANTE-) + cedere “to go” 