- old
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Analogous words: *weak, feeble, infirm, decrepitAntonyms: young2 Old, ancient, venerable, antique, antiquated, antediluvian, archaic, obsolete all denote having come into existence or use in the more or less distant past.Old, opposed to young or new (see also AGED), applies to what has lived or existed long or has been long in use or has stood for a long time in a particular relation to something; ancient, opposed especially to modern, to what lived, existed, or happened long ago or has existed or come down from remote antiquity{
old wine
}{old friends
}{old as the hills
}{O heavens, if you do love old men ... if yourselves are old—Shak.
}{this new exception condemns an advertising technique as old as history—PP. O. Douglas
}{from the ancient world those giants came— Milton
}{some illustrious line so ancient that it has no beginning— Gibbon)Venerable suggests the hoariness and dignity of age{venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to be studied as the mother of our vernacular speech— Quiller-Couch
}{green ropes and leafy ladders hung down from the high limbs of a venerable bread tree— Bemelmans
}Antique applies to what has come down from former, ancient, or classical times or is in some way related to them; with regard to articles (as furnishings, implements, or bric-a-brac) the term suggests an old-fashioned type characteristic of an earlier period{an antique highboy that had belonged to his great-grandmother
}{even a Leonardo regretted his failure to recover the antique symmetry, but he at least imitated the ancients vitally— Babbitt)Refreshing our minds with a savor of the antique, primeval world and the earliest hopes and victories of mankind— Binyon
}Something antiquated has gone out of vogue or fashion or has been for some time discredited; the word often implies some degree of contempt{is it true that antiquated legal ideas prevent government from responding effectively to the demands which modern society makes upon it?— Frankfurter
}{this very lack of manner keeps him from becoming antiquated. His style does not "date," like that of many of his contemporaries— Tinker
}{cherished still their old rage against the northern invaders, a stout and defiant loyalty to their antiquated limitations— Edmund Wilson
}Something antediluvian is so antiquated and outmoded that it might have come from Noah's ark{the whole system of traveling accommodations was barbarous and antediluvian— De Quincey
}{those were antediluvian times. Unions were weak or nonexistent; employers were backed by the courts, the police, and the federal government— Dwight Macdonald
}Something archaic has the characteristics of an earlier, sometimes of a primitive, period; with regard to words, specifically, archaic applies to what is not in use in ordinary modern language but retained in special context or for special uses (as in biblical, ecclesiastical, and legal expressions and in poetry){we visited Medinin, a town so archaic and unreal in its architecture that it was difficult to believe that it was actually inhabited by the human race— Hoffman
}{much of the remote past is conserved in the husk of convention, and archaic usages govern his conduct toward all the crucial issues of life— Norman Lewis
}{to those who do not learn to read Shakespeare as a school text his archaic language presents formidable difficulties— Bottrall
}Something obsolete has gone out of use or has been or needs to be replaced by something newer, better, or more efficient that has subsequently come into being{obsolete as the feudal baron— Snaith
}{a scientific textbook is obsolete in a decade or less— Lowes
}{it was she who had raised a fund for the granite horse trough . . . and who, when the horse trough became obsolete, had had it planted with geraniums— Cheever
}{charged that United States Navy ships were equipped with obsolete torpedoes— Current Biog.
}Analogous words: primitive, primeval, pristine, primal (see PRIMARY)Antonyms: new
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
