historic
adjective
Simple meaning
Very important; noteworthy: having importance or significance in history.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hihstawrikSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
hɪsˈtɔɹɪk
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
adjective
Very important; noteworthy: having importance or significance in history.
Old-fashioned, untouched by modernity.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Very important; noteworthy: having importance or significance in history.
Used this way, historic is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in historical writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Formal and precise
Where it naturally appears
- Historical writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use historic
- “July 4, 1776, is a historic date. A great deal of historical research has been done on the events leading up to that day.”adjective
- “A historic opportunity.”adjective
- “The historic tenses include the imperfect, the pluperfect, and the future perfect.”adjective
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Important
Other combinations
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
The aggregate of past events.
Related to Very important.
Throughout history.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
An era of history having some distinctive feature.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: very important
Commonly Confused With
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.