Meaning & use

ere

preposition·Advanced

An old-fashioned or literary word meaning before, used mainly in poetry and archaic speech.

See it in a sentence

The knight vowed to return home ere the winter snows arrived.

Poets once wrote ere long to mean that something would happen soon.

A note on using this word

Ere is rarely used in modern English outside poetry, hymns, or deliberately archaic or literary writing.

Words with a similar meaning

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Words with an opposite meaning

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