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A forebear is someone in your family who lived a long time before you — not your living parents, but people much further back: a ’s , and the ones before that. We usually meet it in the plural: my forebears. It is a slightly old, word. In everyday talk most people just say ; you will hear forebears in family history, speeches, and writing that wants a little weight. Though actually, English also has a look-alike verb forbear, meaning to hold back and not do something. Same sound, different job — that verb is not about family at all.
祖先；先人（書面一點；口語較常說「祖先」）
組成Late 15th century, from fore- (“before, earlier”) + beer (“one who is or exists”, literally “be-er”). So a forebear is “one who was there before”.
同家族的字
- forefathersame fore- meaning “earlier”, and the same idea of family before you
- beforeshares the old fore piece meaning “earlier in time”
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
forebearnoun詞源 1/ˈfɔːˌbɛə/
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An ancestor.
- One day, among the days, he bethought him of this and fell lamenting for that the most part of his existence was past and he had not been vouchsafed a son, to inherit the kingdom after him, even as he had inherited it from his fathers and forebears; by reason whereof there betided him sore cark and care and chagrin exceeding.
- [1906] 2004, Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville, Ethel Wedgwood tr. Sirs, I am quite sure that the King of England's forbears rightly and justly lost the conquered lands that I hold […]
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。