Dictionary

foregate en · NOUN

Etymology

From Middle English foregate, forgate, equivalent to fore- + gate.

Meanings

1. A main entrance or front gate.
   • In front of the long passage of approach was probably a foregate. 1956, William Richard Lethaby, Architecture, Nature & Magic:
   • Eguipped with two stern ramps and a foregate with internal driving ramp, the 36,400 grt vessel is capable of carrying 2,500 passengers plus up to 600 cars and 16 trailers on its 10 decks. 1983, Finnish Trade Review, (Please provide the book title or journal name):
   • And men go back to it today and will continue through the centuries to go, and say to themselves, as they pass through the foregates, the Propylaea, and come out through those marvellous shadows into the sunlight and see across there, … 1911, California Outlook ... - Volume 12
   • This could be the most ancient part of the complex, composed of keep or donjon equipped with a foregate that must have been served by a drawbridge. 2009, Marco Bini, Cecilia M. Luschi, Castelli e cattedrali:
   • A 'foregate' closed this part of the premises off from the lower yard where there was a 'fyer house' and coalyard, a garden and 'other building'. 1971, Vanessa Parker, The making of Kings Lynn:
   • Further excavation revealed that there had been in the earliest period, perhaps continued to all later times, a foregate, a kind of outer rampart to mask the entrance to the gate so as to require everyone who approached it to do so by a narrow entrance directly in front of the gate and so subject to a concentrated fire of projectiles from the defenders of the gate. This foregate was some fifteen feet in front of the gate itself. At either side of the gate was a great fortress or buttress flanked by a heavy revetement, a fortress also on the north side and a buttress on the south side of the gate. 1926, Bibliotheca Sacra, volume 83:
   • … and, where the nature of the thing admitteth access, there is first a foregate and a wall furnished with turrets, which enclose four or five acres, … 1898, Cheshire Notes and Queries - Volumes 3-4
   • The Lower town which joins to this, is fortified with a Wall and Castle, and a fore-gate at the entrance. 1722, William Camden, Britannia: Or a Chorographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland, volume 2:
   • Ilys hid the mantle at the bottom of her bridal chest—shrouded in cedar, to be drawn forth and worn fifteen years later—and they all rushed to the foregates to greet her husband. 2012, Michael Williams, Oath and the Measure: The Meetings Sextet - Book 4:
   • All the gates of Tallinn were well fortified in the Middle Ages, comprising one or more foregates and the main gate. 2005, Estonia: bits from here and there

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