forerunner

You might think of this novel as a rebuttal or counterpoint to its forerunner, a book that replaces roseate campus fantasy with spikier societal conflicts.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 2026

Instead, a captain visited from Bletchley Park, the then-secret headquarters of the Government Code and Cypher School, the forerunner of GCHQ, and the base for Allied codebreaking.

From BBC ● Oct. 10, 2026

Among the proclamations of the first French republic was an end to slavery in its island possessions—a forerunner of wider abolition.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 27, 2026

The WTO's forerunner was responsible for negotiating the global agreements that reduced tariffs on trade in goods that helped bring about post-WWII prosperity.

From Barron's ● May 6, 2026

More nuanced and more revealing is Wills’s other remark—that “Everett’s classicism was as much the forerunner of Lincoln’s talk as its foil or contrast.”

From "Words Like Loaded Pistols" by Sam Leith

Margaret and Alice are the forerunners of Lucy and Ethel, and Shakespeare’s comedy, written expressly to entertain, gives us a sense of what an Elizabethan-era situation comedy might look like.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2026

Having Albert Brooks as a best friend likely molded his style too; both were forerunners of a school of comedy that merged a naturalistic, conversational delivery with an absurdist sensibility.

From Salon ● Dec. 21, 2025

AMD was founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders and other veterans of Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneering developer of what were known as integrated circuits, the forerunners of modern chips.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025

Wollstonecraft was an advocate of women’s rights and is considered one of the forerunners of feminism.

From Seattle Times ● Nov. 19, 2023

In other words, they were the forerunners of the Death Eaters, and indeed some of them became the first Death Eaters after leaving Hogwarts.

From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling