Word.ws English Dictionary

before the fact

before the fact prepositional phrase: before the commission of a crime.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Before the commission of a crime.
    • accessory before the fact
  2. Assumed prior to factual study; ipso facto true, good, or correct; a priori.
    • Feminism envisaged as a 'home' insists on commonality before the fact, pushing aside all those who would trouble its domestic idyll.2021, Amia Srinivasan, “Preface”, in The Right to Sex, Bloomsbury

Questions about before the fact

What does before the fact mean?
Before the fact means before the commission of a crime.
What part of speech is before the fact?
Before the fact is a prepositional phrase.

Words near before the fact in the dictionary

  1. before one can blink
  2. before one knows it
  3. before one knows where one is
  4. before one's eyes
  5. before someone's time
  6. before the fact
  7. before the ink had time to dry
  8. before the ink was dry
  9. before the mast
  10. before times
  11. before you can say Jack Robertson

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: before the fact (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “before the fact.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/before_the_fact. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.