- 1
If A antedates B, A comes from an earlier time than B. The printing press antedates the internet; that only means it was here first. You can also antedate something to a year: scholars antedate a poem to the twelfth century, meaning they judge that it already existed then. This is fairly formal, academic or legal English. In ordinary talk most people would say is older than or came before. There is another use you will meet on paperwork: to antedate a document is to write a date on it that is earlier than the real day you wrote it — sometimes allowed, sometimes a kind of cheating. The sense here is the history one, not the paperwork trick, though they share the same picture: you are placing something further back in time. It is not anti-date, and it has nothing to do with going on dates.
早於；比…更早出現（公文上另有「倒填日期」，那是同一動詞的另一層用法）
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
antedateverb/ˈæntiˌdeɪt/
- 1
To occur before an event or time; to exist further back in time.
- I suppose you know all about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth—the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles—which are hinted at in the Necronomicon.
- We therefore turn to the question whether defendant's prior convictions for burglary and attempted burglary could be used as the basis for an enhancement under [California Penal Code] sections 667 and 1192.7. Both prior convictions antedate the effective date of section 667.
- 2
To assign a date to a document or action earlier than the actual date.
- Tomorrow when you leav’st, what wilt thou say? / Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow?
- 3
human-scienceslexicographylinguisticsTo find earlier citational evidence for a term.
- Furthermore, while OED entries are generally regarded as a good indication of when terms were first used in English, for 5 of the 7 terms the present research has been able to antedate OED’s earliest attestations, usually by a decade or more.
antedatenoun/ˈæntiˌdeɪt/
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Prior date; a date antecedent to another which is the actual date.
- 2
obsoleteanticipation
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。