HISTORIC

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does historic mean? 

• HISTORIC (adjective)
  The adjective HISTORIC has 2 senses:

1. belonging to the past; of what is important or famous in the past

2. important in history

  Familiarity information: HISTORIC used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HISTORIC (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Belonging to the past; of what is important or famous in the past

Synonyms:

historic; historical

Context example:

a historical character

Similar:

past (earlier than the present time; no longer current)

Derivation:

history (all that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing; a body of knowledge)

history (the aggregate of past events)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Important in history

Context example:

the historic first voyage to outer space

Similar:

important; of import (of great significance or value)

Derivation:

history (the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings)

history (a record or narrative description of past events)

 Context examples 

Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s gauged the storm to be as large as 25,500 miles on its long axis.

(Jupiter's great red spot is shrinking, NASA)

A historic deal has been reached to create the world's largest marine reserve in Antarctica, after years of diplomatic wrangling.

(Deal Reached to Create World's Largest Marine Reserve in Antarctica, VOA News)

Like an old film, Voyager's historic footage of Triton has been "restored" and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon.

(Voyager Map Details Neptune's Strange Moon Triton, NASA)

A set or series of interactions, often forming a network, which biologists have found useful to group together for organizational, historic, biophysical, or other reasons.

(Pathway, NCI Thesaurus)

A black hole and its shadow have been captured in an image for the first time, a historic feat by an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

(Black Hole Image Makes History, NASA)

The European Space Agency's Rosetta probe is approaching Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for a historic mission to orbit and land on the comet's nucleus.

(Rosetta Comet May Be a Contact Binary, NASA)

Shortly after landing, the Chang’e-4 sent a photo of the lunar surface to the Queqiao (“Magpie Bridge”) satellite, which was launched last May in the first phase of the historic mission.

(Chinese Rover Making Tracks on Dark Side of the Moon, VOA)

New Horizons' milestone matches precisely the 25th anniversary of the historic encounter of NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989.

(NASA Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Crosses Neptune's Orbit, NASA)

DNA was extracted from walrus sites and archaeological excavations of walrus samples and compared with data from contemporary walruses, documenting that the Icelandic walrus constituted a genetically unique lineage, distinct from all other historic and contemporary walrus populations in the North Atlantic.

(Extinction of Icelandic walrus coincides with Norse settlement, National Science Foundation)

This study highlights the need to approach historic reconstructions from a multi-disciplinary perspective that brings many lines of evidence to bear in assessing complex events, said Liz Blood, a program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology.

(Justinianic plague not a landmark pandemic?, National Science Foundation)