Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To shape or form beforehand.
  • transitive verb To determine the shape or form of beforehand.
  • noun An object that has been subjected to preliminary, usually incomplete shaping or molding before undergoing complete or final processing.
  • noun Linguistics A reconstructed ancestral word or form.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To form beforehand; execute or create previously.
  • In biology, to determine beforehand the shape or form of; furnish the mold or model of (something afterward to take shape): as, bone preformed in cartilage; the fetal skeleton preforms that of the adult.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To form beforehand, or for special ends.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An object that has undergone preliminary shaping but is not yet in its final form.
  • noun archaeology The rough, incomplete and unused basic form of a stone tool.
  • noun linguistics A word that is no longer in use, but has been reconstructed from current ones.
  • verb To shape something before some other operation.
  • verb Common misspelling of perform.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb form or shape beforehand or determine the shape of beforehand
  • verb form into a shape resembling the final, desired one

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From pre- +‎ form.

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