Forth

Part of speech: adverb

Pronunciation: /fɔːθ/

Definitions

1. Moving forward or onward in time, place, or order; outward from a starting point
2. Proceeding outward or onward, especially from a specific position or point
3. being projected or emitted from a source in a forward direction

Etymology: Forth shares its root with ford, and the two words are closer than they look. Both trace back to a prehistoric Germanic base meaning something like "to go across" or "to pass over," so the crossing place and the act of moving onward grew from the same idea. Old English "forþ" carried the sense of advancing or going out, and that sense of onward movement is what remains in the adverb today. Forth has close relatives in neighbouring languages. Dutch "voort" and German "fort" both mean "onward" or "away," showing that the word was already shared across Germanic speech long before English existed as a separate language. Its ancestry reaches back to an Indo-European root associated with passing through or over, a notion that explains why an idea of travel and direction sits at its core. The word has a separate, unrelated cousin that is easy to confuse with it: the number "fourth." That word comes from a different source and developed through its own sound changes, so the resemblance is coincidental rather than a shared origin.

Synonyms: out, forward

Antonyms: back