foremost
/ˈfɔː.məʊst/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.78 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Positioned in front of (all) others in space, most forward.
adj
Coming before (all) others in time.
adj
Closest to the bow.
adv
adv
Example Sentences
- "She prankes not by hir mistresse side, she preases not to bée / The foremost of the companie, as when she erst was frée."
- "As I plunged into the reeds, my foremost pursuers emerged from the gap."
- "Juan Diego hadn’t noticed the other people in the temple, except for what appeared to be two mourners; they knelt in the foremost pew."
- "[…] of both them, she / (By Pallas counsell) was to haue the grace / Of foremost greeting."
- "1769, Oliver Goldsmith, The Roman History, London: S. Baker and G. Leigh et al., Volume 1, Chapter 16, p. 254, He was the best horseman, and the swiftest runner of his time. He was ever the foremost to engage, and the last to retreat;"
- "a. 1891, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, in The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, New York: Fawcett Premier, 1956, Chapter 17, p. 244, a bright young schoolmate of his whom he had seen struck by much the same startling impotence in the act of eagerly rising in the class to be foremost in response to a testing question put to it by the master"
Etymology
From Old English formest, fyrmest (“earliest, first, most prominent”), from Proto-Germanic *frumistaz, from the locative stem *fur-, *fr- + the superlative suffix *-umistaz, stem ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pr-. The suffix *-umistaz was a compound suffix, created from the rarer comparative suffix *-umô (as in Old English fruma) + the regular superlative suffix *-istaz (English -est); *-umô in turn is from Proto-Indo-European *-mHo-. Cognate with Old Frisian formest, Gothic 𐍆𐍂𐌿𐌼𐌹𐍃𐍄𐍃 (frumists). See for, first and Old English fruma for more. Partially cognate to primus, from Proto-Indo-European *pr- + Latin superlative suffix -imus, from Proto-Indo-European *-mHo-. A comparative former was back-formed analogically, leaving the m from *-umô in place. Later the Old English suffix complex -(u)m-est was conflated with the word most through folk etymology, so that the word is now interpreted as fore + -most.
Origin
- Source language: Old English
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- British English: /ˈfɔː.məʊst/