footnote
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.
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.
- consult the footnotes for more details
- Above all, the 48-page timetables of the new service, which have been distributed free at every station in the scheme, are a model to the rest of B.R. For the first time on British Railways, so far as we are aware, a...
Coordinate Terms: headnote endnote hatnote marginal note
- An event of lesser importance than some larger event to which it is related.
- a mere footnote in history
- If we are another footnote to Plato, Plato was himself already a footnote to still earlier footnotes, in an endless chain of footnotes to footnotes - 2012, Martin McQuillan, Political Archive of Paul de Man, page 72:
- In that context Scotland's fate is a modest element, a symptom of wider fragmentation of the current global order, a footnote to the fall of empire and the Berlin Wall, important to us and punchdrunk neighbours like...
Synonyms: asterisk
- A qualification to the import of something.
Origin
From foot + note.
Forms
Derived
Verb
- To add footnotes to a text.
- 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:
Synonyms: annotate