HISTORY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does history mean? 

• HISTORY (noun)
  The noun HISTORY has 5 senses:

1. the aggregate of past events

2. a record or narrative description of past events

3. the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings

4. the continuum of events occurring in succession leading from the past to the present and even into the future

5. all that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing; a body of knowledge

  Familiarity information: HISTORY used as a noun is common.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HISTORY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The aggregate of past events

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Context example:

a critical time in the school's history

Hypernyms ("history" is a kind of...):

past; past times; yesteryear (the time that has elapsed)

Meronyms (parts of "history"):

antiquity (the historic period preceding the Middle Ages in Europe)

age; historic period (an era of history having some distinctive feature)

Dark Ages; Middle Ages (the period of history between classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance)

Renaissance; Renascence (the period of European history at the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of the modern world; a cultural rebirth from the 14th through the middle of the 17th centuries)

Derivation:

historic (belonging to the past; of what is important or famous in the past)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A record or narrative description of past events

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

account; chronicle; history; story

Context example:

the story of exposure to lead

Hypernyms ("history" is a kind of...):

record (anything (such as a document or a phonograph record or a photograph) providing permanent evidence of or information about past events)

Domain category:

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

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "history"):

ancient history (a history of the ancient world)

etymology (a history of a word)

case history (detailed record of the background of a person or group under study or treatment)

historical document; historical paper; historical record (writing having historical value (as opposed to fiction or myth etc.))

annals; chronological record (a chronological account of events in successive years)

biography; life; life history; life story (an account of the series of events making up a person's life)

recital (a detailed account or description of something)

Derivation:

historic (important in history)

Sense 3

Meaning:

The discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Context example:

history takes the long view

Hypernyms ("history" is a kind of...):

arts; humanistic discipline; humanities; liberal arts (studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills))

Domain member category:

account; chronicle; history; story (a record or narrative description of past events)

historian; historiographer (a person who is an authority on history and who studies it and writes about it)

Saracen ((historically) a Muslim who opposed the Crusades)

Saracen ((historically) a member of the nomadic people of the Syrian and Arabian deserts at the time of the Roman Empire)

Boston Tea Party (demonstration (1773) by citizens of Boston who (disguised as Indians) raided three British ships in Boston harbor and dumped hundreds of chests of tea into the harbor; organized as a protest against taxes on tea)

Derivation:

historic (important in history)

historical (of or relating to the study of history)

Sense 4

Meaning:

The continuum of events occurring in succession leading from the past to the present and even into the future

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Context example:

all of human history

Hypernyms ("history" is a kind of...):

continuum (a continuous nonspatial whole or extent or succession in which no part or portion is distinct or distinguishable from adjacent parts)

Sense 5

Meaning:

All that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing; a body of knowledge

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Context example:

from the beginning of history

Hypernyms ("history" is a kind of...):

cognition; knowledge; noesis (the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning)

Derivation:

historic (belonging to the past; of what is important or famous in the past)

 Context examples 

It usually presents in women with a history of benign uterine leiomyomas that have been surgically removed years before the extrauterine neoplasm spread.

(Benign Metastasizing Leiomyoma of the Uterine Corpus, NCI Thesaurus)

Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing, aunt?

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The program is based on personal and family medical histories of breast and ovarian cancer.

(BRCAPro, NCI Dictionary)

For the first time in his fighting history, men saw White Fang lose his footing.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Mercy on us, how they did talk! first one, then the other, then all burst out together—trying to tell the history of three years in half an hour.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

It was at this point that the sensation of the evening arose—a sensation so dramatic that it can never have been paralleled in the history of scientific gatherings.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The medical history dataset includes the subject's prior history at the start of the trial.

(Medical History Domain, NCI Thesaurus/CDISC)

"Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help you," he said.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The stop date of the medical history item.

(Medical History End Date, NCI Thesaurus)

A characterization of the relationship of an medical history conclusion point in time to a reference point in time.

(Medical History End Relative to Reference Period, NCI Thesaurus)