In grammar, an antecedent is a noun, noun phrase, or clause to which an anaphor r refers in a coreference. For example, in the passage "I did not seeJack because he wasn 't there", "Jack" is the antecedent of the anaphor "he"; together "Jack" and "he" are called a coreference because they both refer to the same thing (in this case, a particular person). The word "antecedent" begins with the prefix "ante-", meaning "before", because almost always the antecedent occurs before the anaphor.
