foreground

UK/ˈfɔː(ɹ)ˌɡɹaʊnd/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,027 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: foregrounds

The foreground is the part of the scene nearest the viewer. In the foreground, foreground interest, blur the foreground.

Landscape photographers hunt for something to put there, because a picture of a distant view with nothing near feels flat. As a verb, to foreground an issue is to bring it to the front of a discussion, and that use is now common in academic writing.

Definitions of foreground

1nounforegroundThe part of the scene nearest the viewer.B2+
“In the foreground of the photo, you can see my children building a sandcastle.”

foreground is a part of a scene.

Where it comes from

Fore plus ground, translating the Dutch voorgrond, from the language of painting.

Middle English
ground
English
ground
English, today
foreground

From fore- + ground. Compare Dutch voorgrond (“foreground”), German Vordergrund (“foreground”), Danish forgrund (“foreground”), Swedish förgrund (“foreground”), Norwegian forgrunn (“foreground”), Icelandic forgrunni (“foreground”). ground comes from Middle English ground. From Middle English ground, from Old English grund, from Proto-West Germanic grundu, from Proto-Germanic grunduz. Cognate with West Frisian grûn, Dutch grond and German Grund. to punish Compare (bring) down to earth, come down to earth.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Photography & Film

Practise this word

foreground in the wild

A line or part need not be a foreground melody.
Melody
A colour range in the foreground footage is made transparent, allowing separately filmed background footage or a static image to be inserted into the scene.
Chroma key
The historian Patricia Ebrey explains her view on the painting that the:...foreground, presented at eye level, is executed in crisp, well-defined brush strokes.
Fan Kuan
To use fill flash, the aperture and shutter speed are adjusted to correctly expose the background, and the flash is fired to lighten the foreground.
Fill flash
Astronomers theorized that it could have been a supernova, but the unique filtering properties of the foreground galaxy made it difficult to decide definitively.
NGC 3314

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

← Vocabulary