| career life history | the general progression of your working or professional life, the general had had a distinguished career, he had a long career in the law |
| history lesson | a lesson in the facts of history |
backdrop
background
backcloth | scenery hung at back of stage |
background desktop
screen background | (computer science) the area of the screen in graphical user interfaces against which icons and windows appear |
| background | a person's social heritage: previous experience or training, he is a lawyer with a sports background |
noise level
background level | the amplitude level of the undesired background noise |
dead hand
dead hand of the past
mortmain | the oppressive influence of past events or decisions |
| ancient history | knowledge of some recent fact or event that has become so commonly known that it has lost its original pertinence |
| natural history | the scientific study of plants or animals (more observational than experimental) usually published in popular magazines rather than in academic journals |
| background background knowledge | information that is essential to understanding a situation or problem, the embassy filled him in on the background of the incident |
background
ground | the part of a scene (or picture) that lies behind objects in the foreground, he posed her against a background of rolling hills |
| history | the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings, he teaches Medieval history, history takes the long view |
| art history | the academic discipline that studies the development of painting and sculpture |
| history | all that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing, a body of knowledge, the dawn of recorded history, from the beginning of history |
past
past tense | a verb tense that expresses actions or states in the past |
past participle
perfect participle | a participle that expresses completed action |
history
account
chronicle
story | a record or narrative description of past events, a history of France, he gave an inaccurate account of the plot to kill the president, the story of exposure to lead |
| ancient history | a history of the ancient world |
| case history | detailed record of the background of a person or group under study or treatment |
| family history | part of a patient's medical history in which questions are asked in an attempt to find out whether the patient has hereditary tendencies toward particular diseases |
medical history
medical record
anamnesis | the case history of a medical patient as recalled by the patient |
biography
life
life story
life history | an account of the series of events making up a person's life |
| background | relatively unimportant or inconspicuous accompanying situation, when the rain came he could hear the sound of thunder in the background |
background
background signal | extraneous signals that can be confused with the phenomenon to be observed or measured, they got a bad connection and could hardly hear one another over the background signals |
background noise
ground noise | extraneous noise contaminating sound measurements that cannot be separated from the desired signal |
| background radiation | radiation coming from sources other than those being observed |
history department
department of history | the academic department responsible for teaching history |
| past master | someone who has long and thorough experience in a given activity |
| past master | someone who was formerly a master |
cosmic background radiation
CBR
cosmic microwave background radiation
CMBR
cosmic microwave background
CMB | (cosmology) the cooled remnant of the hot big bang that fills the entire universe and can be observed today with an average temperature of about . kelvin |
background processing
backgrounding | the execution of low priority programs while higher priority programs are not using the processing system |
past perfect
past perfect tense
pluperfect
pluperfect tense | a perfective tense used to express action completed in the past, `I had finished' is an example of the past perfect |
past progressive
past progressive tense | a progressive tense used to describe on-going action in the past, `I had been running' is an example of the past progressive |
setting
background
scope | the state of the environment in which a situation exists, you can't do that in a university setting |
past
past times
yesteryear | the time that has elapsed, forget the past |
| history | the aggregate of past events, a critical time in the school's history |
| history | the continuum of events occurring in succession leading from the past to the present and even into the future, all of human history |
| past | a earlier period in someone's life (especially one that they have reason to keep secret), reporters dug into the candidate's past |
background
play down
downplay | understate the importance or quality of, he played down his royal ancestry |
travel by pass by
surpass
go past
go by pass | move past, A black limousine passed by when she looked out the window, He passed his professor in the hall, One line of soldiers surpassed the other |
exceed
transcend overstep
pass go past
top
a | be superior or better than some standard, She exceeded our expectations, She topped her performance of last year |
criminative
criminatory
incriminating
incriminatory | charging or suggestive of guilt or blame, incriminatory testimony |
past(a)
preceding(a)
retiring(a) | of a person who has held and relinquished a position or office, a retiring member of the board |
| past | earlier than the present time, no longer current, time past, his youth is past, this past Thursday, the past year |
by
past | so as to pass a given point, every hour a train goes past |