It is often used in English;
for example, "antebellum" means "before the war". ("bellum" is Latin for "war.")
"antecedant" means: the thing that came before
A common mistake in English is "the pronoun with no clearly-defined antecedant".
This means that you use a pronoun, but the reader doesn't know what the pronoun is referencing.
For example: The dog saw the cat. Then it ran away.
In this sentence, you don't know what "it" is.
You don't know whether the dog ran away, or the cat ran away.
