verb
Usage
What does foresee mean? To foresee is to know in advance, as in With all the rain we’ve been having, it was easy to foresee that the river would overflow its banks.Foresee is different from predict or forecast because to foresee is to know, while to predict or forecast is to guess or calculate rather than to know. Sometimes, though, foresee is used as a synonym for predict to exaggerate one’s confidence in a prediction.Example: I can foresee where this is going and I want no part of it.
Related Words
See predict.
Other Word Forms
- foreseeable adjective
- foreseer noun
- unforeseeing adjective
- unforeseen adjective
- well-foreseen adjective
Etymology
Origin of foresee
First recorded before 900; Middle English; Old English foresēon. See fore-, see 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He argued that the founders didn’t foresee the desire of federal lawmakers to hold on to their positions.
The title character and occasional commentator, played as a gloomy babushka in a red headscarf by David Turner, foresees little hope for a glorious future.
Among the high-profile naysayers is Michael Burry, who foresaw the subprime mortgage crisis and recently compared the frenzy around AI to the dot-com bubble.
“You’ve got people coming in and doing things with the ETF wrapper that were probably not foreseen in any way.”
Yet Reganti also doesn’t foresee a significant further drop in 10-year rates, even if the Federal Reserve probably has more flexibility to lower rates after recent jobs and inflation data.
From MarketWatch
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
