What is "prefigure"

Usage examples of "prefigure".

Lucile is thought to have committed suicide, and will note that the first Chateaubriand allusion in the novel refers only to Lucette, and that every subsequent allusion also involves Lucette or prefigures her death.

From its inception it has purported, by exaggeration and anticipation, to predict our futures, to preimagine or prefigure them for us.

But baptism was prefigured in the crossing of the Red Sea, where the Egyptians were drowned, just as our sins are blotted out in baptism.

The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being.

It was a long lonely drive under cloudless skies, prefiguring in a way the final drive I took with Jamie.

And it was to prefigure this that it was not Moses, who received the law for the people on Mount Sinai, that led the people into the land of promise, but Joshua, whose name also was changed at God’.

Sartorius prefigures the many unsettling discoveries made by science in the years since 1871, discoveries which have undermined the old sources of meaning from which humans drew comfort land have yet to replace them).

But none but a contentious man can suppose that there was no prefiguring of the church in so manifold and circumstantial a detail.

This violation of my space seems a prefiguring of what they plan to do to me, a casual dismissal of my rights.

What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?

The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself.

The design of that writer (who in this matter was the instrument of the Holy Ghost) was to descend to Abraham through the successions of ascertained generations propagated from one man, and then to pass from Abraham’s seed to the people of God, in whom, separated as they were from other nations, was prefigured and predicted all that relates to the city whose reign is eternal, and to its king and founder Christ, which things were foreseen in the Spirit as destined to come.

He selects some object, token, or utterance, in harmony with his purpose, and uses it as a symbol to prefigure some moral action or result.

This vision prefigures the black hole disaster, when stellar masses collude to escape our space-time entirely by collapsing to a singular point.

He saw how the virginal circles of Eudoxus had led to a more coherent astronomy, how the conic sections of Apollonius had prefigured the spirit of universal gravitation.