# Anticipation

A legal standard for rejecting a patent claim. If every element of a claim was already disclosed in a single prior art reference — in a patent, article, or product — the claim is "anticipated" and cannot be patented. Anticipation requires a single source to contain every element; if you need two sources, it's an obviousness argument, not anticipation.

**Full entry:** https://patentbrief.org/glossary/anticipation

**All patent terms:** https://patentbrief.org/glossary

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_Source: PatentBrief — https://patentbrief.org. A plain-English glossary of US patent terms._