front
Definitions
Aviation
- noun the forward part or surface
- noun the area, location, or position directly before or ahead
- noun the mixed area between air masses of different temperatures or densities
Banking
- noun a business or person used to hide an illegal trade
Cars & Driving
- noun front seats of a car
Human Resources
- noun a part of something which faces away from the back
Law
- noun an organisation or company which serves to hide criminal activity
Media Studies
- noun the first pages of a book or magazine
- verb to present a television or radio programme
Military
- noun a zone occupied by military forces which are fighting or preparing to fight the enemy
Politics
- noun a political group, usually an alliance of several smaller groups, formed to resist a threat
Publishing
- noun part of the metal type which faces the front, with a notch in it, so that the compositor can tell which way round the piece of type is
Real Estate
- noun a facade of a building, especially the one that faces the street
- verb to give something a visible surface of a particular kind
Slang
- noun courage, cheek, effrontery, chutzpah. This use of the word, as opposed to the colloquial senses of bearing or façade, occurs in phrases such as ‘loads of front’ or ‘he’s got more front than Harrods’ (a reference to the large, impressive frontage of the London store).
Origin & History of “front”
As its close French relative front still does, front used to mean ‘forehead’. both come from Latin frōns, a word of dubious origins whose primary meaning was ‘forehead’, but which already in the classical period was extending figuratively to the ‘most forwardly prominent part’ of anything. In present-day English, only distant memories remain of the original sense, in such contexts as ‘put up a brave front’ (a now virtually dead metaphor in which the forehead, and hence the countenance in general, once stood for the ‘demeanour’). The related frontier (14th c.), borrowed from Old French frontiere, originally meant ‘front part’; its modern sense is a secondary development.
