fronted

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of front.

   The hotel fronted a quiet stretch of coastline.

   He fronted the band for over a decade.

   Note

   One spelling, several verbs behind it: to face, to confront, to put something on the front, and the grammarian's sense of moving a word or clause to the start of a sentence. The intransitive use for facing a direction (the house fronted on the square) is now dated. The same verb, meaning to pronounce with the tongue forward, also gives the phonetic adjective.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a front of a particular type, material, or design.

   The bakery occupied a handsome stone-fronted building on the corner.

   Collectors prize the glass-fronted bookcases of that period.

   Note

   Most at home as the second half of a compound that names what a front is made of or looks like: stone-fronted, glass-fronted, brick-fronted. Before a noun the compound takes a hyphen (a glass-fronted cabinet). Used alone, "a fronted building" sounds incomplete, because the reader is left waiting to learn what kind of front it has.

3. 3
   adjective

   Pronounced with the place of articulation shifted toward the front of the mouth.

   The dialect is known for its strongly fronted vowels.

   Phoneticians mark the fronted variant with a small diacritic.

   Oppositebacked

   Note

   A phonetician's word with a built-in comparison. A front vowel is simply made at the front of the mouth, but a fronted sound has moved forward from where it would otherwise be made. Fronted is therefore the word for accents, sound changes and variants, and it applies to consonants as well as vowels.

4. 4
   adjective

   Formed up in a battle line, with the troops drawn up facing the front.

   The fronted regiments awaited the signal to advance.

   Cavalry massed behind the fronted infantry.

   Note

   A military picture with a literary pedigree: Milton writes of "fronted brigades" in Paradise Lost (1667). Here the word describes a whole body of troops arranged so that it presents a front, not a single soldier facing forward. It stands on its own before the noun, unlike the compound-forming sense, where a material or style is attached to it.

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