Meaning

Having existed in ancient times, descended from antiquity; used especially in reference to Greece and Rome..

Definitions by Sense

1. Having existed in ancient times, descended from antiquity; used especially in reference to Greece and Rome.
2. Belonging to former times, not modern, out of date, old-fashioned.
3. (typography) Designating a style of type.
4. (bookbinding) Embossed without gilt.
5. Synonym of old (“of color: subdued, as if faded over time”).
6. (obsolete) Synonym of antic, specifically:
7. In general, anything very old; specifically:
8. (typography) A style of type of thick and bold face in which all lines are of equal or nearly equal thickness.

Example Sentences

[…] Phillip the younger issue of the king, / Coting the other hill in such arraie, / That all his guilded vpright pikes do seeme, / Streight trees of gold, the pendant leaues, / And their deuice of Antique heraldry, / Quartred in collours seeming sundy fruits, / Makes it the Orchard of the Hesperides, […]

Not that great Champion of the antique world, / Whom famous Poets verse so much doth daunt, / And hath for twelue huge labours high extold, / So many furies and sharp fits did haunt, / […]

I met a traveller from an antique land

From the rest they stand out contrastingly, as the Apollo of the later Greek sculpture-school,—too graceful for divinity and too vivacious for marble,—placed in a company of the antiquer statues with their grand blind look of the almightiness of repose.

Believe an impartial Howadji who has no Cangie or other boats to let at Mahratta, that Nubia is a very different land from Egypt, and that you have not penetrated antiquest Egypt, until you have been awe-stricken by the silence which was buried ages ago in Aboo Simbel, and by the hand-folded Osiride figures, that people, like dumb and dead Gods, that dim, demonic hall.

Some traditions of this antiquer system may have passed into Van Eyck's method, from distemper into oil, and thence downwards, gradually more vague, into the modern process, till they at length disappeared altogether about Rubens's time.

A lonesome traveler might have been seen, / On the turnpike road near the village green, / In a grotesque suit of ultra-marine / And a hat broad-brimmed and conical, / Awkwardly perched in a family cart— / The very antiquest kind / Of an umbrella arching o'er him, / A long black trunk behind / And a short white pony before him, / That ambles on with a jerk and a start, / As though it were taking an active part / In a piece of German machinery.

“There the cause of death was soon ascertained ; the victim of this daring outrage had been stabbed to death from ear to ear with a long, sharp instrument, in shape like an antique stiletto, which […] was subsequently found under the cushions of the hansom.[…]”

Word Forms

• antiquer
• antiquest
• antic
• antick
• anticke
• antiq.
• antiques
• antiquing
• antiqued

Synonyms for antique

Related Words

When Should You Use Antique?

Use antique when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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