past

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Gone by in time

Nouns

1. past, past tense, pretention; the past, yesterday; days of yore or of old; times past or gone by; bygone days; olden times, the good old days, yesteryear, time immemorial; auld lang syne, eld; water over the dam or under the bridge. See priority, oldness.

2. (historical periods) antiquity, antiqueness; time immemorial; remote past; archaism, antiquarianism, medievalism, pre-Raphaelitism; Gay or Naughty Nineties, Roaring Twenties, swingin' sixties; retrospection; looking back; memory; ancestry. Informal, ancient history.

3. (study of the past) history, paleontology, paleography, paleology, archaeology, anthropology, dendrochronology, epigraphy, ethnology.

4. antiquary, antiquarian; paleologist, archaeologist, medievalist, anthropologist, ethnologist.

5. ex. Informal, has-been.

Verbs — be past, have expired, have run its course, have had its day; pass; pass or go by, go or pass away, pass off; lapse; blow over; look back, trace back; turn or put back the clock; exhume, dig up.

Adjectives — past, gone, bygone, foregone; elapsed; lapsed, expired, no more, run out, blown over, that has been, extinct, never to return, exploded, forgotten, irrecoverable; obsolete (see oldness); once, former, pristine, quondam, ci-devant, late; ancestral; foregoing; last, latter; recent, overgoing; perfect, preterite (see grammar); looking back; retrospective, retroactive; archaeological, etc. Informal, ex-.

Adverbs — formerly; of old, of yore; erst, erstwhile, whilom, erewhile, time was, ago; over; in the olden time; anciently, long ago, long since; a long time ago; yesterday; a while back; last year, season, or month; ultimo; lately, retrospectively; before now; hitherto, heretofore; no longer; at one time, once [upon a time]; from time immemorial, in the memory of man; time out of mind; already, yet, up to this time; ex post facto.

Phrases — history is a fable agreed upon; history is fiction with the truth left out; history repeats itself; what's done cannot be undone.

Quotations — History... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind (Edward Gibbon), History is a distillation of rumor (Thomas Carlyle), History is more or less bunk (Henry Ford), But where are the snows of yesteryear? (François Villon), O! call back yesterday, bid time return (Shakespeare), The dark backward and abysm of time? (Shakespeare), Where is the life that late I led? (Shakespeare), Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana), I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes (Carl Sandburg), The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there (L. P. Hartley), I believe in yesterday (Lennon/McCartney), In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere (Maxim Gorky), The past lies like a nightmare upon the present (Karl Marx), We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable (H. G. Wells).

Antonyms, see futurity, present.

II

(Roget's IV) modif.

1. [Having occurred previously]

Syn. former, preceding, gone by, foregoing, elapsed, anterior, antecedent, prior.

2. [No longer serving]

Syn. ex-, retired, earlier; see preceding .

• not put it past someone,

Syn. suspect, accuse, expect; see anticipate 1 , fear 1 , guess 2 .

n.

1. [Past time]

Syn. antiquity, long ago, past times, old times, years ago, good old days, good old times, ancient times, former times, days gone by, auld lang syne, yore, days of old, days of yore, yesterday.

Ant. future*, the present, tomorrow.

2. [Past events]

Syn. knowledge, happenings, events; see history .

3. [Concealed experiences]

Syn. secret affair, love affair, amour, hidden past, bronzed past, scarlet past, scarlet letter, scarlet A.

prep.

Syn. through, farther than, behind; see beyond .

III

(Roget's 3 Superthesaurus)

I

n.

yesterday, *yesteryear, history, olden days, antiquity, days of old, *good old days, yore, horse and buggy days, dark ages. ''The best prophet of the future.''—Lord Byron. ''The misty black and bottomless pit of time.''—Thomas Duffett. ''A funeral gone by.''—Edmund Gorse. ''What's past is prologue.''—Shakespeare.

ANT.: future, tomorrow, days to come

II

a.

gone, bygone, over, forgotten, finished, old, historical, ancient, former, passed, never to return, extinct, dead and buried.

ANT.: future, upcoming

IV

(Roget's Thesaurus II) I adjective 1. Just gone by or elapsed: antecedent, anterior, earlier, foregoing, former, precedent, preceding, previous, prior. See TIME. 2. Having been such previously: erstwhile, former, late, old, once, onetime, previous, quondam, sometime, whilom. See PRECEDE. II noun 1. Past events surrounding a person or thing: background, history. See HAPPEN. 2. A former period of time or of one's life: yesterday, yesteryear, yore. Idioms: bygone days, days gone by, the good old days, the old days. See TIME.