prehistory

• pre-history

From pre- (“before”) +‎ history, first attested in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836,^[1] after the model of prehistoric, from French préhistorique.

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prehistory (countable and uncountable, plural prehistories)

1. The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.

   Synonym: prehistoric age

   • 2014 September 29, Douglas Quenqua, “Toolmaking May Have Risen Independently”, in The New York Times‎^[2]:

     “We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”

2. The study of those times.
3. (humorous, hyperbolic) Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.
   • 1984, Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth, page 25:

     I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.

4. (often as pre-history) The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.
   • 1931 July 25, Time & Tide, page 893:

     Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.

   • 2021, David Golinkin, “What is the Origin and History of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony”, in Anat Helman, editor, No Small Matter Features of Jewish Childhood:

     One of the challenges of studying any Jewish custom is that we tend to view it in an anachronistic fashion; we think that what we do today is what was always done. Therefore, in this article we shall describe the pre-history of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, the four basic components of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony before the year 1800 as suggested by Michael Hilton, and six major changes that occurred in modern times.

• posthistory

• prehistorian
• prehistoric

• “prehistory, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.