superannuated

comparative more superannuated · superlative most superannuated

1. Obsolete, antiquated.

   Files written fifteen or twenty years ago on superannuated computers and obsolete operating systems are for practical purposes irretrievable.

   2010, Bruce Rich, To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India, Beacon Press, published 2010, →ISBN

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   In Europe it’s too dreary—the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability, the verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects.

   1886 [1882], Henry James, The Point of View, London: Macmillan and Co.

   The above, appearing in a publication now long ago superannuated and forgotten, is all that hitherto has stood in human record to attest what manner of men respectively were John Claggart and Billy Budd.

   1888–1891, Herman Melville, “[Billy Budd, Foretopman.] Chapter XXV.”, in Billy Budd and Other Stories, London: John Lehmann, published 1951, →OCLC

   Your correspondent has a handful of superannuated computers lying around the home. The sprightliest of the bunch—a 400-megahertz Pentium II that came loaded with Windows NT4.0—has found a new lease on life as a Linux server.

   2007 June 1, “Sledgehammers and hard drives”, in The Economist, archived from the original on 16 May 2025

   To call the sexual politics of Ladette to Lady old-fashioned is an understatement. It's a horrifying revival of superannuated attitudes about women dressed up as an educational excursion into young womanhood that exploits its subjects by loading them up on alcohol when the cameras are rolling.

   2009 March 24, Larissa Dubecki, “Critic's view”, in The Age, archived from the original on 04 Feb 2019

   The 158 was a delicate and not especially sure-handling device, but by now its engine had been modified to produce 250 horsepower, which gave it a decisive speed advantage over the superannuated old clunkers that were predominately arranged against it.

   2010, Stuart Mann, Gordon Murray, Art of the Formula 1 Race Car, Motorbooks, published 2010, →ISBN, page 14

   Synonyms: archaic, dated, out of date, outdated, outmoded, anachronistic, antediluvial, antediluvian

2. Retired or discarded due to age.

   And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated, superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze.

   1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

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   I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.

   1811, Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 2

   And overseeing them all, like a raddled old good-ish fairy, is Bill Nighy, playing a superannuated rocker hoping to get a Christmas number one with his cynically repackaged version of Love Is All Around.

   2003 November 21, Peter Bradshaw, “Love Actually”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 06 Mar 2026

   Synonyms: decrepit, long in the tooth, over the hill, elder, elderly, geriatric, gerontologic, gerontological

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of superannuate