before my time
1
6.1
- idiom
:
antes de mi época
- That was a little before my time.
See another comedy icons who were before my time, but I still knew.
- See another comedy icons who were before my time, but I still knew.
- Well, that was a little a couple of years before my time, but I know that it was ugly.
Examples
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I heard that the concert was amazing, but it was all before my time.
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Must have been a bit before my time.
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This was all way before my time.
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That was way before my time.
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That was before my time.
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That was before my time.
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That's a little before my time.
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"That was way before my time," Nina said.
Fiction book (1991) -
The Run-DMC shoe of choice spoke to me more, even though they were far before my time.
Blog text (19) -
The iconic movie was released long before my time, yet it remains a classic.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is transparently built from 'before' (earlier than) + 'my' (belonging to me) + 'time' (period), so it literally means an event occurred earlier than the speaker's experience. This temporal-possession composition is cross-linguistically common and follows normal English patterns, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents will understand it.
Etymology
Before my time gives a simple picture: imagine a clock or calendar showing a date before you were born. It means something happened 'before I was born' or 'before I knew about it', so we use it to say the event was earlier than our own life or experience.