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Contemporary vs Historical - What's the difference?

contemporary | historical |

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)
  • From the same time period, coexistent in time.
  • * Cowley
  • A grove born with himself he sees, / And loves his old contemporary trees.
  • * Strype
  • This king was contemporary with the greatest monarchs of Europe.
  • Modern, of the present age.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01
  • , author=Robert L. Dorit , title=Rereading Darwin , volume=100, issue=1, page=23 , magazine= 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.}}
  • * {{quote-news
  • , year=2012 , date=May 24 , author=Nathan Rabin , title=Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3 , work=The Onion AV Club 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.}}
  • Relatively recent
  • Synonyms

    * contemporaneous

    Antonyms

    * anachronistic: in the wrong time period * archaic

    Noun

    (contemporaries)
  • Someone or something living at the same time, or of roughly the same age as another.
  • ''Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare.
    ''The early mammals inherited the earth by surviving their saurian contemporaries .
  • Something existing at the same time.
  • historical

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Pertaining to the history, to what happened in the past.
  • Usage notes

    * * See the usage notes about (m) for more.

    Synonyms

    * historic

    Derived terms

    * ahistorical * art-historical

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A historical romance.
  • * 1999 , Anne K. Kaler, Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek, Romantic Conventions , page 63:
  • 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.