yesterday

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

yesterday (ˈjɛstədɪ, -ˌdeɪ)

—n
1.	the day immediately preceding today
2.	(often plural) the recent past

—*adv*
3.	on or during the day before today
4.	in the recent past

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

yesterday

O.E. geostran dæg, from dæg "day" + geostran "yesterday," from P.Gmc. *gestra- (cf. O.H.G. gestaron, Ger. gestern "yesterday," O.N. gær "tomorrow, yesterday," Goth. gistradagis "tomorrow"), originally "the other day" (reckoned from "today," either backward or forward), from PIE *ghes

(cf. Skt. hyah, Avestan zyo, Pers. di, Gk. khthes, L. heri, O.Ir. indhe, Welsh doe "yesterday;" L. hesternus "of yesterday").

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

yesterday

see not born yesterday.

Example sentences

Before long, yesterday's liberators became today's foes.

To hear how the limits of yesterday are only the beginnings of today.

Yesterday's styles may be observed in the stables, today's in the drawing room.

Blackened dirt and ashen remains of the wooden posts that supported the

structure are as vivid as a campfire put out yesterday.

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yesternoon yestreen airmail bump climb clock

Idioms & Phrases

not born yesterday

Matching Quote

"All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds."

-Stefan Zweig