provenance

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English

Etymology

Borrowed from French provenance (“origin”), from Middle French provenant, present participle of provenir (“come forth, arise”), from Latin provenio (“to come forth”).

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA(key): /ˈpɹɒ.və.nəns/, /ˈpɹɒ.və.ˌnɒns/
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • (US) IPA(key): /ˈpɹɑ.və.nəns/, /ˈpɹoʊ.və.nɑns/

Noun

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

provenance (countable and uncountable, plural provenances)

  1. Place or source of origin.
    Many supermarkets display the provenance of their food products.
    • 2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings of ASIALEX 2015 Hong Kong, Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, page 147:
      Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little.
  2. (archaeology) The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage notes below.
    This spear is of Viking provenance.
    • 1982, Thomas Lawton, “Bronze Vessels, Fittings, and Weapons”, in Chinese Art of the Warring States Period‎, Smithsonian Institution, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 79, column 1:
      Further support for the Shansi provenance came in 1965, when a bronze quadruped with identical ornamentation and of approximately the same size as the Freer example was unearthed in tomb 126, at Fen-shui-ling, Ch'ang-chih, Shansi Province.
  3. (art) The history of ownership of a work of art.
    The picture is of royal provenance.
  4. (computing) The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data used to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance).
  5. (computing) The execution history of computer processes which were used to compute a final piece of data (process provenance).
  6. (of a person) Background; history; place of origin.
    Synonym: ancestry

Usage notes

  • The term provenience in archaeology has largely replaced provenance because provenience is restricted to in situ location at the date of archaeological discovery rather than the "origin-to-present" chain of custody details of proper provenance as is customarily used by historians, museums, and commercial entities.

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

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Verb

provenance (third-person singular simple present provenances, present participle provenancing, simple past and past participle provenanced)

  1. To establish the provenance of something

Translations

French

Pronunciation

Noun

provenance f (plural provenances)

  1. provenance, origin
    La violence continue en provenance de Homs, l’épicentre de contestation.
    Violence continues in Homs, the epicentre of the protests.

Related terms

Further reading

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