footnote means A short piece of text, often numbered, placed at the bottom of a printed page, that adds a comment, citation, reference etc, to a designated part of the main text. It carries an Arena rating of 1601, earned across 68 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, footnote ranks #599 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #1,532 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #1,750 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #3,850 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words.
footnote is pronounced /ˈfʊtˌnəʊt/.
Why “footnote” is a great word
FOOTNOTE — [Noun, Verb] A note of reference, explanation, or comment placed at the bottom of a page corresponding to a designated part of the text. From foot (in the sense of 'bottom part') + note (a brief written record); formed within English by compounding. Unlike an endnote, which exiles its commentary to a remote appendix, or a marginal annotation, which may roam the borders of a page, a footnote is an act of immediate, subterranean courtesy. It is the quiet scholar clearing their throat, the thin ruled line separating narrative from evidence, the small superscript number waiting like a silent butler at the sentence's end. It is the architecture of a page granting sanctuary to the tangential, a formal acknowledgment that no story is truly self-contained.
Etymology
From foot + note.
noun
- A short piece of text, often numbered, placed at the bottom of a printed page, that adds a comment, citation, reference etc, to a designated part of the main text.e.g.“consult the footnotes for more details”
- An event of lesser importance than some larger event to which it is related.e.g.“a mere footnote in history”
- A qualification to the import of something.
verb
- To add footnotes to a text.e.g.“She does everything she does with a kind of terrifying thoroughness, footnoted and bibliographied, as it were, down to the smallest detail.” — 1979 April 14, Nancy Walker, “Kiss and Tell”, in Gay Community News, page 13:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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