prefigure

That certainly wasn’t the first time a Leonard Cohen song seemed to prefigure events that had not happened, or to capture a global state of mind before it fully coalesced.

From Salon ● Jan. 21, 2025

Early on, when the heroine, the novice Isabella, is introduced with a prayer, the music seems to prefigure “Parsifal.”

From New York Times ● Jun. 26, 2022

But even as the spare language of her lines endows them with a monumental feel, their brevity and levity also prefigure the semiotically fraught short exchanges of the texting era.

From Washington Post ● Nov. 17, 2021

People who have received the shots two to four weeks earlier should watch for symptoms that may prefigure the onset of clotting.

From Seattle Times ● Jul. 13, 2021

Yet he sat for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings.

From The Quickening by E. M. Ashe

In its range of diverse styles, his work prefigured the eclectic jazz of the 21st century.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 7, 2026

The rumored price increases from Samsung were prefigured in a note on the stock by Citi analyst Peter Lee last week.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 6, 2026

It is widely understood to have prefigured the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the rise of modern conservatism.

From Slate ● Jan. 6, 2025

They did not expect what this vocabulary prefigured for their lives.

From Salon ● Sep. 24, 2024

Higher than this, however, must be the agreement of the two, prefigured perhaps in such sentences as 'Mercy and truth have kissed each other.'

From Julia Ward Howe 1819-1910 by Maud Howe Elliott

That’s one way to start a book—bracing and bitter, conveying Mary Cain’s scorn for the athletic-shoe-and-sportswear giant while prefiguring her larger message that “sports normalizes cruelty.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 24, 2026

Through his character, though, the show has also explored the impact of battlefield trauma, prefiguring the more explicitly mental health-conscious TV that we see today.

From New York Times ● Jun. 15, 2022

Smith was prefiguring a national movement that would open more roles to artists of color.

From Washington Post ● Jun. 10, 2022

You mention them as prefiguring the activism of the Freedom Summer.

From Salon ● Apr. 10, 2022

Already, in this paragraph, written twenty years ago, a prefiguring instinct spoke within me of some great secret yet to come in the art of distant communication.

From Autobiographical Sketches by Thomas De Quincey