prehistory

CEFRC1

/ˈpriˈhɪstəri/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
noun
The time before people began keeping written records.
02
noun
Extra detail
Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.

Examples

At a glance

Sits at C1 on the CEFR scale

Deep Dive

Extra meanings

The study of those times.
The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.
The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.

In context

I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.
“We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”
Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.

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The word in print, with each source given in full.

“We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”
2014 September 29, Douglas Quenqua, “Toolmaking May Have Risen Independently”, in The New York Times
I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.
1984, Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth, page 25
Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.
1931 July 25, Time & Tide, page 893
One of the challenges of studying any Jewish custom is that we tend to view it in an anachronistic fashion; we think that what we do today is what was always done. Therefore, in this article we shall describe the pre-history of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, the four basic components of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony before the year 1800 as suggested by Michael Hilton, and six major changes that occurred in modern times.
2021, David Golinkin, “What is the Origin and History of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony”, in Anat Helman, editor, No Small Matter Features of Jewish Childhood

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From pre- (“before”) + history, first attested in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836, after the model of prehistoric, from French préhistorique.