antecedent

Wilson redefined “liberty” not as a natural right antecedent to the government, but as “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 15, 2026

They found that physical frailty can be an indicator of future social isolation over time and that loneliness may be both an antecedent and an outcome of frailty.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 14, 2024

Maybe the Satanic panic isn't even the best kind of antecedent, but rather the child abduction panic or the gang crime panic, where there is a real problem, but blown out of proportion.

From Salon ● Oct. 8, 2024

Maybe the closest antecedent is a new, $85 million HUD program called “Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing,” or PRO Housing, which this summer issued 17 grants of a few million dollars each.

From Slate ● Sep. 24, 2024

A high school teacher complained that it did, because the possessive phrase Toni Morrison’s cannot serve as the antecedent of the pronoun her.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

“The publicity blitz for Hour of Code,” Ms. Singer writes, “had no antecedents in U.S. education and represented a new strategy for education reform.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 21, 2026

Cheney’s new book, “Oath and Honor,” is a mostly straightforward, occasionally repetitive, literarily undistinguished account of that investigation as well as its antecedents and aftermath.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 4, 2023

“If I do something that shocks me or that I’m not proud of, I’m able to frame that behaviorally and sort of understand the antecedents, the behavior itself and then the consequence,” she said.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 1, 2023

Hurley was a longtime art professor who died, age 72, in 2021; he knew his abstract antecedents by heart.

From New York Times ● Jul. 5, 2023

It is something of a puzzle that the word ‘experiment’ did not come with it, despite its respectable Latin antecedents.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton