forerun
forerun verb: to run in front.
Verb
forerun (third-person singular simple present foreruns, present participle forerunning, simple past foreran, past participle forerun)
- To run in front.
- Bailey still sat, doubled over his book […] A finger forerunning his eyes along the page.1969, Maya Angelou, chapter 22, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York: Bantam, published 1971, page 131
- To precede; to forecast or foreshadow.
- These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.1595 December 9 (first known performance), William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Richard the Second”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to...
- And in herself she moan’d, ‘Too late, too late!’ / Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, / A blot in heaven, the Raven, flying high, / Croak’d, […]1859, Alfred Tennyson, “(please specify the page)”, in Idylls of the King, London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC
Forms of forerun
| third-person singular present | foreruns |
|---|---|
| present participle | forerunning |
| past | foreran |
| past participle | forerun |
Origin of forerun
From fore- + run. Piecewise cognate of Swedish förrinna.
Words formed from forerun
Questions about forerun
- What does forerun mean?
- Forerun means to run in front.
- What part of speech is forerun?
- Forerun is a verb.
- What is the past tense of forerun?
- The past tense of forerun is foreran.
Words near forerun in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: forerun (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “forerun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/forerun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.