Word.ws English Dictionary

forein

forein is the obsolete spelling of foreign.

Meaning of foreign

Adjective

foreign (comparative more foreign, superlative most foreign)

  1. Located outside a country or place, especially one's own.
    • foreign markets; foreign soil
  2. Originating from, characteristic of, belonging to, or being a citizen of a country or place other than the one under discussion.
    • foreign car; foreign word; foreign citizen; foreign trade
  3. Relating to a different nation.
    • foreign policy; foreign navies
  4. Not characteristic of or naturally taken in by an organism or system.
    • foreign body; foreign substance; foreign gene; foreign species
  5. (formerly with from) Alien; strange; uncharacteristic.
    • It was completely foreign to their way of thinking.
    Synonyms:
    alien, fremd
  6. (obsolete) Held at a distance; excluded; exiled.
    • Kept him a foreign man still; which so grieved him, / That he ran mad and died.1613 (date written), William Shakespeare, [John Fletcher], “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio)...

See all 17 meanings of foreign

Forms of forein

comparativemore forein
superlativemost forein

Questions about forein

What is forein the obsolete spelling of?
Forein is the obsolete spelling of foreign.

Words near forein in the dictionary

  1. foreignizing
  2. foreignly
  3. foreignness
  4. foreignnesses
  5. foreigns
  6. forein
  7. foreintend
  8. foreintended
  9. foreintending
  10. foreintends
  11. forejudge

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: forein (page history and authors); foreign (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: “forein.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/forein. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.