adumbration

[ ad-uhm-brey-shuhn ]

noun

a shadow or faint image of something:In the south, where the Tibetan plateau begins its gradual rise, we can just glimpse the hazy adumbration of its mountains above the undulating horizon.
a foreshadowing of or precursor to something:Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy of 1808 serves in every way as an adumbration of the Ninth Symphony.The essay is a fascinating adumbration of an idea that would become the author’s obsession six months later.

concealment or overshadowing:The haunting tune reflects the sad adumbration of the heroine’s emotional priorities as she rejects her prospective lover.

Origin of adumbration

First recorded in 1530–1540; adumbrat(e) + -ion

But Sanjay seems today like an adumbration, rather than the acme, of authoritarian possibilities in India.
Hold Onto Your Penis | David Frum, Justin Green | November 29, 2012 | THE DAILY BEAST
She would give things to the girls—he had a private adumbration of that; expensive Parisian, perhaps not perfectly useful, things.
The Tragic Muse | Henry James
What was subconscious became conscious, what, back in the past, was a mere adumbration gloried out in Aurora splendours.
The Kempton-Wace Letters | Jack London
There seems to be little adumbration of the dark marginal lines of asper in populations from the lower Mississippi River drainage.
North American Recent Soft-shelled Turtles (Family Trionychidae) | Robert G. Webb
However, the soul evidently gave a form to this adumbration from the very beginning of things.
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 2 | Plotinos (Plotinus)

Our present life, in which we are not united with the divinity, is only a trace or adumbration of real life.
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 1 | Plotinos (Plotinus)

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