Before there was antediluvian, there were the Latin words ante (meaning "before") and diluvium (meaning "flood"). In the 1600s, English speakers were using antediluvian to describe conditions they believed existed before the great flood described in the biblical account of Noah and the ark. By the early 1700s, the word had come to be used as both an adjective and a noun referring to anything or anyone prodigiously old. Naturalist Charles Darwin used it to characterize the mighty "antediluvian trees" some prehistoric mammals might have used as a food source, and in his American Notes, Charles Dickens described an elderly lady who informed him, "It is an extremely proud and pleasant thing … to be an antediluvian."