Word.ws English Dictionary

prefigure

/pɹiːfɪɡjɚ/

prefigure verb: to show or suggest ahead of time; to represent beforehand.

Verb

prefigure (third-person singular simple present prefigures, present participle prefiguring, simple past and past participle prefigured)

  1. (often in a Biblical context) To show or suggest ahead of time; to represent beforehand.
    • Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, all prefigure NRx urban futures.2018 September 29, Roger Burrows, “On Neoreaction”, in The Sociological Review Magazine
  2. To predict or foresee.

Noun

prefigure (plural prefigures)

  1. That which prefigures or appears to predict; a harbinger.
    • Quite different is the way in which the tomboy girled the rebel narrative. In recent years, queer theorists have taken a deep interest in the tomboy as a prefigure for the butch dyke.2005, Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, page 293
    • In his influential commentary (the Moralia) Gregory the Great interpreted the protagonist typologically as a prefigure of Christ and of the Church persecuted.2012, C. S. Shapley, Studies in French Poetry of the Fifteenth Century, page 5

prefigure meaning in Urdu, Bengali and Malayalam

prefigure in Urdu

بیان کرنا, پیشنگوئی کرنا

prefigure in Bengali

পূর্বাভাস দেওয়া, প্রতীকী হওয়া

prefigure in Malayalam

presage, foreshadow, be a harbinger of
മുൻസൂചന നൽകുക, മുന്നോടിയായിരിക്കുക, മുൻകൂട്ടി നിഴലിപ്പിച്ചു കാട്ടുക, മുൻകൂട്ടി രൂപസൂചന നല്കുക, മുൻകൂട്ടി അറിയിക്കുക, മുന്നടയാളം നൽകുക

Examples of prefigure in a sentence

  • Auder’s obsessive videomaking prefigures the relentless narcissism of our current self-publishing mania, but there’s artfulness to his seemingly unmediated recording.
  • Oldenburg’s legendary Happenings, the anarchic, semiscripted group performances involving sculptural props and sets that prefigured today’s performance art.
  • In recent years, queer theorists have taken a deep interest in the tomboy as a prefigure for the butch dyke.

All 12 example sentences with prefigure

Synonyms of prefigure

All synonyms of prefigure

Forms of prefigure

Verb
third-person singular presentprefigures
present participleprefiguring
past participleprefigured
pastprefigured
Noun
pluralprefigures

Origin of prefigure

From Middle English prefiguren, from Latin praefigurare, from figurare (“to shape, picture”).

Words formed from prefigure

Questions about prefigure

What does prefigure mean?
Prefigure means to show or suggest ahead of time; to represent beforehand.
What is prefigure in Urdu?
Prefigure in Urdu is بیان کرنا, پیشنگوئی کرنا. See Prefigure meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is prefigure?
Prefigure can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce prefigure?
Prefigure is pronounced /pɹiːfɪɡjɚ/.
What is the past tense of prefigure?
The past tense of prefigure is prefigured.

Words near prefigure in the dictionary

  1. prefiguration
  2. prefigurations
  3. prefigurative
  4. prefiguratively
  5. prefigurativeness
  6. prefigure
  7. prefigured
  8. prefigurement
  9. prefigurements
  10. prefigures
  11. prefigureth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prefigure (page history and authors); prefigure (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); prefigure (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); prefigure (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-prefigure.wav.

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