adumbration

[ ad-uhm-brey-shuhn ]

noun

1. a shadow or faint image of something:

   In the south, where the Tibetan plateau begins its gradual rise, we can just glimpse the hazy adumbration of its mountains above the undulating horizon.

2. a foreshadowing of or precursor to something:

   Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy of 1808 serves in every way as an adumbration of the Ninth Symphony.

   The essay is a fascinating adumbration of an idea that would become the author’s obsession six months later.

3. concealment or overshadowing:

   The haunting tune reflects the sad adumbration of the heroine’s emotional priorities as she rejects her prospective lover.

Word History and Origins

Origin of adumbration¹

First recorded in 1530–1540; adumbrat(e) ( def ) + -ion ( def )

Example Sentences

As breezily self-confident as its eponymous heroine, “Catherine Called Birdy” crucially departs from the original text in the film’s final act, a paean to female independence and an adumbration of the change about to take place with the rise of the Renaissance.

From Washington Post

Might his house of worship turn out to be, as Ms. Ozick put it, “the truly-revealed Invisible Church, an adumbration of the divine intention? When the Redeemer is called on only to help a man make a living, does he make a life instead? Buechner implies yes.”

From New York Times

I had distinct memories of my life before my father became sick, but the person I was seemed like a rose-coloured adumbration of my present self.

From The Guardian

Critchley’s most bracing commentary may be that on Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s 2006 film “Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait,” about the French star: “On the one hand, it gives us a sense of the capture of reality by commodified images in the century into which we have slowly slouched our way. But on the other hand … there is the suggestion, the adumbration of an inaccessible interiority, a reality that resists commodification.”

From New York Times

The overwhelming majority of the 533 ideas in Works never went further than adumbration and collection in this strangely interminable little book.

From Slate

Related Words

• advice
• announcement
• clue
• evidence
• idea
• implication
• impression
• information
• inkling
• intimation
• mention
• notion
• reference
• reminder
• scent
• sign
• suspicion
• symptom
• taste
• tinge