Fro

Part of speech: adverb

Pronunciation: /fɹəʊ/

Definitions

1. to express a sense of retreat or departure in conversation
2. A term indicating movement away from a point or an action of going back; often used in expressions to denote returning to a previous state or condition
3. Referring to the direction of moving away, particularly in a phrasing that suggests leaving or going backwards in some context

Etymology: "Fro" survives today almost only in the phrase "to and fro," where it means "away" or "back," the opposite direction to "to." It is a shortened form of "from," and its history has been one of shrinking, from a full preposition down to a clipped sound used in a single fixed pairing. Its ancestry runs through Old Norse, the language of the Scandinavian settlers in northern England. The word is closely related to Scots "frae" and Icelandic "frá," both meaning "from," which points to a shared Norse-influenced root rather than a Latin or French route. English "from" and this shorter form are therefore siblings that developed in parallel within the same family of Germanic words. The clipped form survived because "to and fro" became a fixed idiom, locking the old word into a phrase where its meaning was preserved even as it dropped out of ordinary speech. The adverb is used in conversation to signal a sense of retreat or departure, though that sense is a modern extension of the older, more general idea of motion away from a place.

Synonyms: back, away, from