antedating
noun, verb
antedating is a noun meaning “The action of marking with an earlier date” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-N-T-E-D-A-T-I-N-G, and it appears about once in every 66 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of antedating is antedatings.
What does antedating mean?
noun
- 1
The action of marking with an earlier date.
- 2
An earlier citation of a lexical item.
The new edition of the dictionary contains several antedatings.
verb
- 1
present participle and gerund of antedate
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of antedating
- antedatings plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is antedating?
Antedating appears about once in every 66 million words in written English, the 255,765th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Antedating in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense the action of marking with an earlier date:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| Portuguese | pré-datação, antedatação |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.