say it: AYN-chuhnt
ancient is a noun and adjective meaning "a very old person". It carries 4 recorded senses.
a very old person
a person who lived in ancient times
belonging to times long past especially of the historical period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire
“ancient history”
“ancient civilizations such as those of the Etruscans and Sumerians”
“ancient Greece”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for ancient come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.