Provenance meaning

prŏv'ə-nəns, -näns'
Provenance is defined as the place where something originally came or began, or a record tracing the ownership history of certain items that helps to confirm their authenticity and value.

When a rug is woven in India, this is an example of a time when the provenance is India.

When a piece of art can be traced back in history as first having been owned by a King and then by two collectors, this history of the owners is an example of the provenance of the art.

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Place of origin; derivation.
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Origin; derivation; source.
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Place or source of origin.

Many supermarkets display the provenance of their food products.

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(archaeology) The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage note below.

This spear is of Viking provenance.

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(art) The history of ownership of a work of art.

The picture is of royal provenance.

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(computing) The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data utilized to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance)
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(computing) The execution history of computer processes which were utilized to compute a final piece of data (process provenance)
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(of a person) Background; history; place of origin; ancestry.
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Origin of provenance

  • French from provenant present participle of provenir to originate from Old French from Latin prōvenīre prō- forth pro–1 venīre to come gwā- in Indo-European roots
    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
  • From French provenance (“origin"), from Middle French provenant, present participle of provenir (“come forth, arise"), from Latin provenio (“to come forth").
    From Wiktionary

Provenance Sentence Examples

  • The exact provenance of these cylinders is not known, but there is every reason to believe that they were found in Cyprus.

  • Edmund Naumann was the discoverer of these facts, and his attention was first drawn to them by learning that an edible sea-weed, which flourishes only in salt water, is called Asakusanon, from the place (Asakusa) of its original provenance, which now lies some 3 m.

  • Whatever view be taken of the provenance of Codex Vaticanus it is plain that its archetype had the Pauline epistles in a peculiar order which is only found in Egypt, and so far no one has been able to discover any non-Alexandrian writer who used the Neutral text.

  • Beyond the fact that it was found at Nippur during the fourth of the American expeditions, there does not appear to be any exact record of its provenance; and, in order to determine its date, it is necessary to rely on the external and internal evidence furnished by the tablet itself.

  • Lot's "Etudes sur la provenance du cycle arthurien," Romania, vols.

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Words near provenance in the Dictionary