Foreman

How to spell foreman

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce foreman

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does foreman mean?

1. nounA worker who supervises and directs a team of other workers, especially on a building site or in a factory.
2. nounThe member of a jury chosen to lead its discussions and announce its verdict.

Foreman in a sentence

• The site foreman checked that every scaffold was secure before the shift began.

• The foreman rose and read the jury's verdict aloud to the court.

• Workers reported the faulty machine to their foreman straight away.

• The jurors elected a foreman before they began their deliberations.

Where does foreman come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, built from two very old Germanic elements. The first part, fore, comes from Old English fore meaning 'in front of' or 'ahead', the same element that gives us forecast, forehead, and foresee. The second part, man, comes from Old English mann, originally meaning simply 'a person' before it narrowed toward the modern adult-male sense. Put together, a foreman was literally the man who stood at the front, the one leading or going ahead of the others, and by the 1500s the word had settled into its working sense of a chief or overseer of a group of labourers. The spelling trap is the silent, unstressed first syllable: it is fore, not 'for', so the e is easy to drop in writing even though it carries the whole 'in front' meaning.

How the word is built

• fore- (in front, before, ahead)
• man (person, here in the sense of one in charge)