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

Exhibited in New York in 1952, the works prefigure the Pop Art movement by a decade; Warhol began drawing and painting dollar signs in the early 1960s.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 17, 2022

Its remaining original construction — in the vernacular idiom, with touches that prefigure the Baroque, and an Orientalist flared red ceramic tile roof — dates to the late 1500s.

From New York Times ● Sep. 24, 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

Gradually he put aside his perplexities concerning the future, permitting his mind to prefigure nothing but his duties with Landon at Meeker’s Mill.

From The Forester's Daughter A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range by Hamlin Garland

“That selectivity is prefigured, and preprogrammed, by the history of Christendom.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 31, 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

The ideal lover whom she had prefigured in some of her waking dreams had always spoken with ardor—a holy ardor.

From The Garden of Eden by Max Brand

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

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

From Salon ● Apr. 10, 2022

The Czech Republic’s fourth-wealthiest businessman, Mr. Babis first entered politics in 2011 and, prefiguring Mr. Trump’s cry of “drain the swamp” adopted the slogan of “end the political morass.”

From New York Times ● Oct. 9, 2021

Centrally, though, Chéri evolved a portrait of independent-minded women living in the shadow of slavery, but prefiguring a time when black women might have access to a world that recognized them as equals.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 6, 2020

In several chapters of this book we shall treat the subject of entire sanctification allegorically, using the types as prefiguring Christian experience.

From Adventures in the Land of Canaan by Robert Lee Berry