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OneKitly

predecessor

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɹiːdɪsɛsə(ɹ)//
  • United States//ˈpɹɛd.ə.sɛs.ɚ//
  • United States//ˈpɹi.də.sɛs.ɚ//
  • Canada//ˈpɹiːdɪsɛsɚ//

One who precedes; one who has preceded another in any state, position, office, etc.; one whom another follows or comes after, in any office or position.

noun

  1. 1

    One who precedes; one who has preceded another in any state, position, office, etc.; one whom another follows or comes after, in any office or position.

    I thought about my predecessor, who had died of drink and smoke; and I could have wished he had been so good as to live, and not bother me with his decease.

    "The Northern Heights at last," you say to yourself, hastily closing the carriage window because the Yorkshire coal used by the Eastern Region and its predecessors makes their tunnels more sulphurous than any we know.

  2. 2

    A model or type of machinery or device which precedes the current (or later) one. Usually used to describe an earlier, outdated model.

    The steam engine was the predecessor of diesel and electric locomotives.

    No. 6959 is painted in the standard wartime black livery and, like its immediate predecessors, does not carry a nameplate, but the words "Hall Class" have been painted on the middle coupled-wheel splasher.

  3. 3

    A vertex having a directed path to another vertex

Etymology

From Middle English predecessour, from Old French predecesseor (“forebear”), from Late Latin praedēcessor, from Latin prae- (“pre-”) + Latin dēcessor (“retiring officer”), from Latin dēcēdō (“to retire, to die”) (English decease).

Forms

plural
predecessors
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).