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To prefigure something is to be an early sign of it — a shape, a scene, or a person that already shows, in small or strange form, what will come later. A dark sky can prefigure a storm; a child’s gift for drawing can prefigure a life as an artist; in older religious writing, a story in the past is said to prefigure a later event. It is a literary, slightly churchy or essay word. People do not say it when they mean “I guessed” or “I planned.” Though actually, it sits close to foreshadow, but prefigure keeps the picture-sense: something is already drawing the later thing, before that thing arrives. You will mostly meet it in books, not in conversation. There is a related noun, prefiguration, for that early picture, but the verb is the form students will see.
預示；預兆（書面；像提早畫出後來會發生的事）
組成From Middle English prefiguren, from Latin praefigurare, from figurare (“to shape, picture”). pre- “before” + figure “shape.”
同家族的字
- figuresame Latin figurare, “to shape, picture”
原始詞典資料3 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。
prefigureverb/pɹiːfɪɡjɚ/
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To show or suggest ahead of time; to represent beforehand.
- Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, all prefigure NRx urban futures.
- 2
To predict or foresee.
prefigurenoun/pɹiːfɪɡjɚ/
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That which prefigures or appears to predict; a harbinger.
- Quite different is the way in which the tomboy girled the rebel narrative. In recent years, queer theorists have taken a deep interest in the tomboy as a prefigure for the butch dyke.
- In his influential commentary (the Moralia) Gregory the Great interpreted the protagonist typologically as a prefigure of Christ and of the Church persecuted.
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。