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

Though he was new to the business of gold-mining—as new as either the bank teller or myself—he could prefigure pretty accurately what was before us.

From Branded by Francis Lynde

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

This improbable gift was succeeded by a clock-radio—a Sony Dream Machine with a blue digital display in a sleek white cube that prefigured Apple’s austere aesthetic.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 11, 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 smoke which issued from their heads, and overspread their pages, was prefigured in the mists that issued from under their door-sills and out of their windows.

From Pierre; or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville

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

In 2017, Democrats made unexpected gains in the House of Delegates with candidates who were predominantly women and minorities, prefiguring the national trend of more diverse candidate pools.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 22, 2021

The characters frame their impatience with Edie — her transgressions, her need — as a generational divide, prefiguring, perhaps, how this book might be read.

From New York Times ● Aug. 4, 2020

But it is a prefiguring merely, and not a direct suggestion.

From Trilbyana The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel by Jeannette Leonard Gilder