Forearm

How to spell forearm

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce forearm

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does forearm mean?

1. nounThe part of the arm between the elbow and the wrist.

Forearm in a sentence

• The nurse wrapped a bandage around his forearm after the blood test.

• She rested her forearm on the desk while typing.

Where does forearm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This single spelling actually hides two different stories, joined by the prefix fore-, an Old English element meaning 'before' or 'in front'. In the noun sense, forearm simply combines fore- with arm in the body-part sense, which descends from the Old English earm, a thoroughly Germanic word for the limb that has cousins across the Germanic languages. So the forearm is literally the 'front' or lower part of the arm, the stretch between elbow and wrist. The verb forearm tells a different tale: here arm carries the sense of weapons and equipping for battle, which came into English from the Latin arma, meaning 'arms' or 'tools of war', by way of Old French. To forearm therefore meant to arm yourself in advance, and the idea survives in the proverb that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. The matching stress shift, with the noun stressed on the first syllable and the verb on the second, is the quiet trap, though the spelling itself stays identical.

How the word is built

• fore- (before, in front)
• arm (in the noun: the limb, from Old English earm; in the verb: weapons, from Latin arma)