• Today's Word

Anachronistic

🔊 Listen to the word Anachronistic

uh-NAK-ruh-NIS-tik

Definition

(adjective) Belonging to a different era and jarringly out of place in its current context.

Example

The executive’s insistence on fax machines and printed memos felt deeply anachronistic in an office where everything else ran on AI.

Word Origin

Anachronistic derives from the Greek anachronismos, built from ana- (“against” or “back”) and chronos (“time”). It entered English in the 17th century, initially used by historians and literary critics to describe errors in which a person, object, or custom is placed in the wrong historical period — a clock appearing in a Shakespeare play set in ancient Rome, for instance. Over time it broadened into everyday use to describe anything that feels like a relic of a time that has long since passed.

Fun Fact

Hollywood has a dedicated profession devoted entirely to catching anachronisms — the continuity supervisor, whose job is to ensure nothing appears on screen that doesn’t belong in the film’s time period. Despite this, some of cinema’s most celebrated films are riddled with them. Gladiator famously features a gas canister visible beneath a chariot in one scene, and Braveheart — set in 13th century Scotland — includes kilts that weren’t actually worn in Scotland until centuries later. Audiences rarely notice, which raises the question of whether an anachronism that nobody catches is really an anachronism at all.