In what situation would you use 'forewarn' instead of plain old 'warn'?
The 'fore' part seems redundant to me.
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3I've never seen prewarn, where have you seen it? There is forewarn as in the phrase Forewarned is fore-armed.– MynamiteCommented Dec 13, 2013 at 0:08
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2It means to warn beforehand, which, I must admit, does seem a bit redundant.– user31430Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 0:20
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It's not redundant. You could warn before, during, perhaps even after, a disaster. Whether some of those are effective is a different matter. See the dictionary.– KrisCommented Dec 13, 2013 at 6:22
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@Kris The point is I have seen the dictionary definition of 'warn' and it suggests it is to inform someone in advance, which has always been before in my book.– rybo111Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 8:08
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meta: Please avoid changing the question in its essence. You have the option of rollback now, though. (This is my personal peeve, I'm not one of the ELU guys. I flagged it.)– KrisCommented Dec 13, 2013 at 12:10
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2 Answers
I agree with the 'timeliness' implication. There is a clear real-world difference between
“Watch out - lightning!”
and
"Do not sail now, the seas will be rough/the weather will turn inclement.”
Both "warning" and "forewarning" counsel caution, but a forewarning necessarily arrives in time and counsels precaution. (Which seems to be the sum and substance of the saying forewarned is forearmed.) Forewarn is thus a better choice of word to connote shades of 'prophecy': you may 'warn' because you see danger, but you 'forewarn' because you foresee it.
When I imagine somebody saying “We were forewarned,” I sense the voice of gratitude, but "We were warned” is a mere statement of fact. Allowing for inflection, the distinction between the two words is gravitas.
A couple of points on the polysemy of Warn:
a) Warn can easily stand in for “threaten” in some usage contexts.
b) A warning can be issued after the event has come to pass- in a legal context, a judge’s warning to a first-time offender guilty of a minor misdemeanor.
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I like your comment on precaution. Could we say that warning calls for caution, and forewarning calls for precaution? This, of course, foregrounds the question of caution vs. precaution. Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 16:53
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The judge warning is the best example I've seen - you can't forewarn of a potential repeat offence. So perhaps it is the person receiving the warning that is taken into account. But you are still warning of something which is potentially impending.– rybo111Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 18:25
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While I think that this has the makings of a really good answer, linked and attributed references adding support to claims made in 'answers' are really what are required on ELU. Unsupported claims often look like (and sometimes are) no more than mere opinion. Commented Jan 2, 2020 at 11:58
I agree that forewarn and warn are pretty much synonymous. One place you can't interchange them, of course, is "forewarned is forearmed". That's a set phrase, so the words can't be substituted.
The main difference seems to be that while you can warn anytime before an event, you can't forewarn just as the event starts. For example: you can warn of a landslide when you see the rocks start to shift, but by that point it's too late to forewarn.
If you look at etymonline you can see that warn comes from a word meaning "to give notice of impending danger".
The OED says, similarly to etymonline, that forewarn comes from the Old English meaning of warn: "To take heed, be on ones guard, beware" which indicates an immediateness, and the prefix fore-, which is from Old English and indicates something like "the earliest time".
So the difference around the time of coinage may have been that warning happened at the time of danger, and forewarning happened earlier, possibly (as the OED states) as a prophecy, or just as advice long before the issue arises.
answered Dec 13, 2013 at 8:55
