Ancestral vs Descendant - What's the difference?
ancestral | descendant |
Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors; as, an ancestral estate.
descending from a biological ancestor.
proceeding from a figurative ancestor or source.
(literally) One who is the progeny of a specified person, at any distance of time or through any number of generations.
(figuratively) A thing that derives directly from a given precursor or source.
(biology) A later evolutionary type.
(linguistics) A language that is descended from another.
(linguistics) A word or form in one language that is descended from a counterpart in an ancestor language.
* 1993 , Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, “The Slavic i''-verbs with an excursus on the Indo-European ''?''-verbs”, in Bela Brogyanyi and Reiner Lipp (editors), ''Comparative-Historical Linguistics , John Benjamins Publishing, ISBN 978-90-272-3598-5,
As adjectives the difference between ancestral and descendant
is that ancestral is of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors; as, an ancestral estate while descendant is descending from a biological ancestor.As a noun descendant is
(literally) one who is the progeny of a specified person, at any distance of time or through any number of generations.ancestral
English
Alternative forms
* ancestrall (obsolete) * auncestral (obsolete)Adjective
(-)Anagrams
* ----descendant
English
Adjective
(-)Usage notes
The adjective may be spelled either with ant'' or ''ent'' as the final syllable (see descendent). The noun may be spelled only with ''ant .Alternative forms
* descendentAntonyms
* ascendant, ascendent, ascendingNoun
(en noun)- ''The patriarch survived many descendants : five children, a dozen grandchildren, even a great grandchild.
- ''This famous medieval manuscript has many descendants .
- ''Dogs evolved as descendants of early wolves.
- English and Scots are the descendants of Old English.
page 479:
- The direct descendant of this form is the Slavic aorist: Sb.-Cr. n?s?'', ''d?nos? .