forebear
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of forebear
1425–75; Middle English (Scots), equivalent to fore- fore- + -bear “being,” variant of beer; see be, -er 1
Explanation
Your father, grandmother, and great grandfather are all your forebears. A forebear is an ancestor, or someone you are descended from. You might have thought that forebear means to stop yourself from doing something. The word you are thinking of is forbear. Confused? The "e" makes all of the difference here. Whereas the first is a noun, the second is a verb. Just remember that if you see fore like in before, it's the people who came before you.
Vocabulary lists containing forebear
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill is a forebear of the short-and-sweet literary canon.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 28, 2026
The “Love Story” forebear that matters most in this discussion is not John F. Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
From Salon ● Feb. 12, 2026
Maye’s been so persuasive it’s provoking inevitable but treacherous comparisons to Brady, his carbohydrate-shunning forebear, now immortalized in 12 feet of handsome bronze outside the Foxborough gate.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 29, 2025
Named for its Star Trek forebear, Holodeck generates a virtually limitless range of indoor environments, using AI to interpret users' requests.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 11, 2024
She pulled her forebear off her wrist and switched it from a shield to its normal hover mode.
From "Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky" by Kwame Mbalia
With this new project we can learn a great deal about our early prehistoric forebears, about how they lived and what their worlds looked like.
From BBC ● Apr. 15, 2026
The younger Windsors are eschewing the grinding rounds of endless ribbon-cutting their forebears engaged in to try to make fewer, more high-impact interventions heralded to the nation via social media.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 11, 2026
“Lido Shuffle” appears to have two musical forebears: Fats Domino’s shuffle rhythms and Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 23, 2026
She also started incorporating images of other inspiring women, including her maternal forebears and the Cuban American sculptor Ana Mendieta.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 30, 2025
It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
