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annals

UK/ˈæn.əlz/US/ˈæn.əlz/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,726 of 15,258mostly written

Annals are a yearly record of events. The annals of the abbey, in the annals of crime, annals of the society.

The strict sense is a record kept year by year, which is how medieval monasteries wrote history. The loose sense is any historical record, usually in the phrase in the annals of. It is always plural, and it comes from the Latin for a year.

Tacitus · Public domain

Definitions of annals

  1. 1nounannalsA yearly record of events.C1

    “The monks recorded floods, famines and battles in the town's annals.”

annals is a record.

Where it comes from

Latin annales libri means yearly books, from annus, a year. Annual and anniversary are relatives.

  1. Latin

    annālēs librī — chronicles

  2. Middle French

    annales

  3. English, today

    annals

Built from

  • annālis · Latin — pertaining to a year
  • annus · Latin — year
  • liber · Latin — book

Borrowed from Middle French annales, from Latin annālēs librī (“chronicles”), from annālis (“pertaining to a year”), from annus (“year”) + librī, plural of liber (“book”). Compare with annual.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

annals in the wild

  • In 2006, the annals were digitized and made available online by the National Institute of Korean History.

    Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty

  • The Annals of Ulster are annals of medieval Ireland.

    Annals of Ulster

  • A number of Irish annals, of which the earliest was the Chronicle of Ireland, were compiled up to and shortly after the end of the 17th century.

    Irish annals

  • Most of the Irish annals were written between the 14th and 17th centuries.

    Irish annals

  • Almost all of the material in the Chronicle is in the form of annals, by year.

    Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the annus family

anniversaryannual

annals — used about once every 5,163 pages · #9,726 · point at the bar for the others