a person in charge of a particular department, group of workers, etc., as in a factory or the like.
the member of a jury selected to preside over and speak for all the jurors on the panel.
Gender-neutral form: supervisor. a person, often experienced, who supervises other workmen
Female equivalent: forewoman. law the principal juror, who presides at the deliberations of a jury
See -man.
1175–1225; Middle English forman chief servant, steward. See fore-, man
On many job sites, the boss or supervisor is called the foreman. If you get a job on a construction crew, the foreman is the person in charge. While the supervisor in an office, hospital, or school has a totally different title, in manual labor it's common to use the word foreman. This is true in factories and plants, as well as on ranches and railroads. Even on a jury there's a foreman, the member who announces the group's verdict. A woman in one of these roles might be called foreman, forewoman, or foreperson. A simpler, gender-neutral compromise is to use "supervisor" instead.
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
I started as a night warehouse foreman, and then I ran a tanker and barge dock in Boston.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 27, 2026
But the site's foreman, a committed revolutionary called Orlando Diaz, insists they are a well-ventilated, smart solution to the capital's acute housing crisis.
From BBC • May 22, 2026
And after she came back to California and got married, she and her husband, the Rindge ranch foreman, started up a Guernsey milk business that became one of the biggest dairy operations in the world.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 14, 2026
My father, Rudy, was the foreman at Associated Transport, a huge trucking company with a branch in Richmond that went bankrupt.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 9, 2025
With an irritable “Don’t lag! Don’t lag!” the foreman strode on again.
From "The Golden Goblet" by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
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.
