provenance
/ˈpɹɑ.və.nəns/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.15 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage notes below.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data used to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance).
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Many supermarkets display the provenance of their food products."
- "Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little."
- "This spear is of Viking provenance."
- "Further support for the Shansi provenance came in 1965, when a bronze quadruped with identical ornamentation and of approximately the same size as the Freer example was unearthed in tomb 126, at Fen-shui-ling, Ch'ang-chih, Shansi Province."
- "The picture is of royal provenance."
Etymology
Borrowed from French provenance (“origin”), from Middle French provenant, present participle of provenir (“come forth, arise”), from Latin provenio (“to come forth”).
Origin
- Source language: French
Word Breakdown
- Root: provenance
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈpɹɑ.və.nəns/
- British English: /ˈpɹɒ.və.nəns/