footnote
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English[edit]
Alternative forms[edit]
- f.n. (abbreviation)
Etymology[edit]
Pronunciation[edit]
- (UK) IPA(key): /ˈfʊtˌnəʊt/
Audio (Southern England) (file) - (US) IPA(key): /ˈfʊtˌnoʊt/
Audio (US) (file)
Noun[edit]
footnote (plural footnotes)
- A short piece of text, often numbered, placed at the bottom of a printed page, that adds a comment, citation, reference etc, to a designated part of the main text.
- Coordinate terms: headnote, endnote, hatnote, marginal note
- consult the footnotes for more details
- 1960 December, “The Glasgow Suburban Electrification is opened”, in Trains Illustrated, page 714:
- Above all, the 48-page timetables of the new service, which have been distributed free at every station in the scheme, are a model to the rest of B.R. For the first time on British Railways, so far as we are aware, a substantial timetable has been produced, not only without a single footnote but also devoid of all wearisome asterisks, stars, letter suffixes and other hieroglyphics.
- (by extension) An event of lesser importance than some larger event to which it is related.
- Synonym: asterisk
- a mere footnote in history
- 2012, Martin McQuillan, Political Archive of Paul de Man, page 72:
- If we are another footnote to Plato, Plato was himself already a footnote to still earlier footnotes, in an endless chain of footnotes to footnotes
- 2014 September 8, Michael White, “Roll up, roll up! The Amazing Salmond will show a Scotland you won't believe”, in The Guardian:
- In that context Scotland's fate is a modest element, a symptom of wider fragmentation of the current global order, a footnote to the fall of empire and the Berlin Wall, important to us and punchdrunk neighbours like France and Italy, a mere curiosity to emerging titans like Brazil.
- A qualification to the import of something.
Translations[edit]
comment at the bottom of a printed page
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event of lesser importance
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Verb[edit]
footnote (third-person singular simple present footnotes, present participle footnoting, simple past and past participle footnoted)
- To add footnotes to a text.
- Synonym: annotate
- 1979 April 14, Nancy Walker, “Kiss and Tell”, in Gay Community News, page 13:
- She does everything she does with a kind of terrifying thoroughness, footnoted and bibliographied, as it were, down to the smallest detail.
