frontfire
frontfire verb: to have the intended effect.
Verb
frontfire (third-person singular simple present frontfires, present participle frontfiring, simple past and past participle frontfired)
- To have the intended effect.
- Talking of backfire, frontfire or whatever, John Carroll can give it both barrels, and simultaneously.2002 August 18, Liam Griffin, “For the championship’s sake, it must be Tipp”, in Sunday Tribune (Dublin, Ireland)
- I want to discuss that false psychic you paid to bring Heather messages from the dead. It was a thoughtful idea, but one that backfired and then, ultimately, in its own way, frontfired, giving Heather more hope than you’d imagine.2003, Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!, →ISBN
Forms of frontfire
| third-person singular present | frontfires |
|---|---|
| present participle | frontfiring |
| past participle | frontfired |
| past | frontfired |
Origin of frontfire
From front + fire, coined as an opposite for backfire (and not usually seen without it).
Questions about frontfire
- What does frontfire mean?
- Frontfire means to have the intended effect.
- What part of speech is frontfire?
- Frontfire is a verb.
- What is the past tense of frontfire?
- The past tense of frontfire is frontfired.
Words near frontfire in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: frontfire (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: “frontfire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/frontfire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.