Meaning: The ratio of the output to the input of any system. Classified under: Nouns denoting relations between people or things or ideas. Hypernyms (efficiency is a kind of...): ratio (the relative magnitudes of two quantities (usually expressed as a quotient))
uk â /ËÃ¦n.tiËsiË.dÉnt/ us â /ËÃ¦n.tÌ¬ÉËsiË.dÉnt/. âº formal someone or something existing or happening before, especially as the cause or origin of something existing or happening later: Charles Babbage's mechanical calculating engines were the antecedents of the modern computer. Many people feel a great curiosity to find out about their antecedents. âº specialized language a word or phrase that a pronoun refers back to: In the sentence He picked a book off the shelf and handed it to Sally, book is the antecedent of it.
An antecedent is a thing that comes before something else. You might think rap music has no historical antecedent, but earlier forms of African-American spoken verse go back for centuries. In logic, mathematics, and grammar, the word antecedent (from Latin ante-, before + cedere, to yield) has the meaning the first part of a statement.. More generally, it means something that came before, and perhaps caused, something else.. The word is also an adjective: a lawyer or judge might talk about the antecedent events leading up to someone committing a crime.