Foresee

How to spell foresee

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce foresee

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does foresee mean?

1. verbTo be aware of or predict that something will happen in the future.

Foresee in a sentence

• The analysts could not foresee the sudden collapse of the housing market.

• Few managers foresee the staffing problems that the merger would create.

Where does foresee come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English compound, recorded in Old English as foreseon, built from the prefix fore-, meaning 'before' or 'in advance', and seon, the ancestor of the modern verb 'see'. The literal sense was 'to see beforehand', and that visual metaphor for predicting events has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years. The fore- element is the same one that appears in 'forecast', 'foretell', and 'foreword', all conveying the idea of something coming ahead of time. A common spelling trap is the double 'e' in the middle: because fore- ends in an 'e' and 'see' begins with an 's' followed by 'ee', writers sometimes drop a letter, but the word keeps the full 'see' intact. The closely related noun 'foresight' shows the same prefix paired with a different word for perception.

How the word is built

• fore- (before, in advance)
• see (to perceive; from Old English seon)