Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of, relating to, or evolved from an ancestor or ancestors.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Pertaining to ancestors or progenitors; descending or claimed from ancestors: as, an ancestral estate; ancestral trees; a king on his ancestral throne.
- In biology, of or pertaining to an ancestor; being an earlier, and presumably lower or more generalized, type from which later more specialized forms of organized beings are asserted to have been evolved.
Wiktionary
- adj. Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors; as, an ancestral estate.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Of, pertaining to, derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. inherited or inheritable by established rules (usually legal rules) of descent
- adj. of or belonging to or inherited from an ancestor
Examples
“They are now fighting to return to what they call their ancestral land.”
“His earlier studies led him to formulate what he called the ancestral law.”
“The first of these resulted in ancestral Asu speakers settling into the South Pare Mountains and in proto-Sabaki speech communities spreading north of the Pangani River, along the narrow stretches of the Kenyan coast.”
“The wide phylogenetic distribution suggests that signaling most likely evolved in ancestral eukaryotes.”
“The arc of Earth's limb appeared — immediately recognizable, as if coded in ancestral memory.”
“Parents across the sea, rolling in ancestral gold and Bank of England notes, acquired a reality they had never enjoyed before.”
“A slower legacy for Bruce Lee in Chinese ancestral town”
“In the time since he helped start Trackers Bay two and a half years ago, Nutt has seen a surge in interest in what are often called ancestral skills.”
“To McCann, Eisenhower often referred to his ancestral region in the Palatinate as “good people, sound people—who, even among those who stayed, rejected Nazism.””
“Despite the shifting topography, the neighborhood still recalled my ancestral culture and I felt peace and permanence staring at the Italian Catholic church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.”
Wayne Trujillo: The Barrio: Home To Immigrants, Mother Cabrini And My Inner Child
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