ancestor

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Lord Courtenay entered the upper chamber in 2018 after inheriting his late father's title, which was first given to a distant ancestor in 1142, almost 900 years ago.

From BBC • Mar. 13, 2026

It is true that he is the first member of the royal family to be arrested since his ancestor King Charles I was tried and executed at Westminster in 1649.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 23, 2026

The museum called the find of the elephant relative and the ancestor of today's slow-moving tree-dwellers with long, curved claws "one of the most relevant" in Costa Rica in decades.

From Barron's • Feb. 13, 2026

The team focuses on a special group of genes called "universal paralogs," which preserve evidence of biological changes that took place before the last universal common ancestor.

From Science Daily • Feb. 10, 2026

The parents of a child provided, on average, half the content of that feature; the grandparents, a quarter; the great-grandparents, an eighth—and so forth, all the way back to the most distant ancestor.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee