Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use forebear in a sentence

16 example sentences · noun

Forebear means an ancestor. Example: “Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined.”

Examples of forebear by meaning

nounAn ancestor.

  • Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined.2013 June 7, Jonathan Freedland, “Obama is like Apple, Google and Facebook: a once hip brand tainted by Prism”, in The Guardian Weekly...

More sentences with forebear

  • At the same time, the monotremes still pay homage to their premammalian forebears.2008 May 13, Natalie Angier, “A Gene Map for the Cute Side of the Family”, in New York Times. From the entry premammalian
  • But he might be the only Gen X-er who paired such ambitions with impressions of a disgraced forebear.2022 September 13, Matt Flegenheimer, “Is Ron DeSantis the Future of the Republican Party?”, in The New York Times Magazine. From the entry Gen X-er
  • And so, like all its forebears and afterbears, like everything but his present bear, the photo-exposé idea curled up and croaked.2011, Michael Griffith, Trophy: A Novel. From the entry afterbear
  • Psychiatrists, in such circumstances, may have followed the precedence of their spiritual forebears—religious confessors—in respecting the privacy of their patients.2004, Paul Jackson, chapter 3, in One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II, Montreal and Kingston…. From the entry precedence
  • They are thus more actorlike in some respects, but arguably less actors (than their forebears, or peasants) in other respects.2002, Joseph Berger, Morris Zelditch, New Directions in Contemporary Sociological Theory, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page 253. From the entry actorlike
  • That may be, but the fact is, envirocentrism was completely alien to the religion of our Asatru forebears.2000 May 29, Rorik, “Re: Nature religion? An OR perspective”, in alt.religion.asatru (Usenet), message-ID…. From the entry envirocentrism
  • As if in bold retaliation for the failures of their forebears, our teensters have taken over in a great big way.1969, Calvert Stein, Practical Family and Marriage Counseling, page 178. From the entry teenster
  • “Our forebears builded better than they knew.”1923, Dan McKenzie, Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells, p. 6. From the entry builded
  • Free reed instruments such as this shō and its Chinese forebear, the sheng, have been known in East and Southeast Asia since antiquity.2015, J. Kenneth Moore, Jayson Kerr Dobney, E Bradley Strachen-Scherer, Musical Instruments: Highlights of The Metropolitan Museum of Art…. From the entry shō
  • That you watch over me, your “looksake,” as you do all your forebears, intervening on my behalf with God probably more often than polite.2014, Nina Foxx, A Letter for My Mother, page 123. From the entry looksake
  • Young people all across the continent were inured to a level of public brutality, in words and actions, that would have shocked their nineteenth-century forebears.2005, Tony Judt, “Culture Wars”, in Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945, London: Vintage Books, published 2010, →ISBN. From the entry inure
  • They doubtless represented the most enlightened people of the earth at that time and had taken long strides in advance of their more primitive forebears.1925, Floyd Lavern Darrow, Through Science to God, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, pages 136-137. From the entry enlightened
  • In less of a nod than a jabbed finger to the film's own forebears, Felix drops in a mention of Evelyn Waugh being reputedly obsessed with the place.2023 November 13, Rosalind Jana, “Saltburn and the bizarre life of Britain's stately homes”, in BBC. From the entry under the surface
  • We can be sure that the Euro-Asian women and men who walked or paddled into America brought with them the mythology, music, dances, and religious practices of their forebears.2014, Karen Olsen Bruhns, Karen E. Stothert, “The First Women in America”, in Women in Ancient America, 2nd edition, Norman, Okla.…. From the entry Euro-Asian
  • "Dracula the Un-Dead” forsakes the epistolary format of its forebear in favor of a penny-dreadfulish narrative pitting the first book’s surviving characters against a monomaniacal vampire countess.2009 October 22, Jan Stuart, “Fiction Chronicle”, in The New York Times. From the entry penny-dreadfulish

Meaning of forebear

  1. noun An ancestor.

Full definition of forebear

Questions about forebear in a sentence

How do you use forebear in a sentence?
Forebear is used as a noun. For example: “Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined.”
What is a short sentence with forebear?
““Our forebears builded better than they knew.””
What does forebear mean?
Forebear means an ancestor.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: forebear (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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