Contemporary vs Historical - What's the difference?
contemporary | historical |
From the same time period, coexistent in time.
* Cowley
* Strype
Modern, of the present age.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01
, author=Robert L. Dorit
, title=Rereading Darwin
, volume=100, issue=1, page=23
, magazine=
* {{quote-news
, year=2012
, date=May 24
, author=Nathan Rabin
, title=Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3
, work=The Onion AV Club
Relatively recent
Someone or something living at the same time, or of roughly the same age as another.
Something existing at the same time.
A historical romance.
* 1999 , Anne K. Kaler, Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek, Romantic Conventions , page 63:
As adjectives the difference between contemporary and historical
is that contemporary is from the same time period, coexistent in time while historical is pertaining to the history, to what happened in the past.As nouns the difference between contemporary and historical
is that contemporary is someone or something living at the same time, or of roughly the same age as another while historical is a historical romance.contemporary
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- A grove born with himself he sees, / And loves his old contemporary trees.
- This king was contemporary with the greatest monarchs of Europe.
citation, passage=We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.}}
citation, page= , passage=Men In Black 3 finagles its way out of this predicament by literally resetting the clock with a time-travel premise that makes Will Smith both a contemporary intergalactic cop in the late 1960s and a stranger to Josh Brolin, who plays the younger version of Smith’s stone-faced future partner, Tommy Lee Jones.}}
Synonyms
* contemporaneousAntonyms
* anachronistic: in the wrong time period * archaicNoun
(contemporaries)- ''Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare.
- ''The early mammals inherited the earth by surviving their saurian contemporaries .
External links
* * *historical
English
Usage notes
* * See the usage notes about (m) for more.Synonyms
* historicDerived terms
* ahistorical * art-historicalNoun
(en noun)- However, as regular romance readers know, the romance novels that appear on the best-seller lists are not Harlequins at all, but rather historicals and contemporaries, which vary widely from the Harlequin pattern in style, plot, and character.