footnote

plural footnotes · alternative f.n.

1. 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

   1 more example

   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 substantial timetable has been produced, not only without a single footnote but also devoid of all wearisome asterisks, stars, letter suffixes and other hieroglyphics.

   1960 December, “The Glasgow Suburban Electrification is opened”, in Trains Illustrated, page 714

2. broadlyAn event of lesser importance than some larger event to which it is related.

   a mere footnote in history

   3 more examples

   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 France and Italy, a mere curiosity to emerging titans like Brazil.

   2014 September 8, Michael White, “Roll up, roll up! The Amazing Salmond will show a Scotland you won't believe”, in The Guardian

   Now, with her new book Beyond the Wall, Hoyer is seeking to retrieve the GDR from being written off as a chilling “footnote in German history”, a miserably grey country synonymous with unflinching totalitarianism.

   2023 April 28, Frederick Studemann, “Katja Hoyer: we need to hear ‘the whole story’ about East Germany”, in Financial Times, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC

   Synonyms: asterisk

3. A qualification to the import of something.

present singular third person footnotes · participle present footnoting · participle past footnoted · past footnoted · alternative f.n.

1. 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