foreleg

plural forelegs · alternative fore · alternative leg

1. Either of the two legs towards the front of a four-legged animal such as a horse, or towards the front of a many-legged animal such as most insects, or of a piece of furniture, etc.

   Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg[…]

   1943 November – 1944 February (date written; published 1945 August 17), George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Animal Farm […], London: Secker & Warburg, published May 1962, →OCLC

   2 more examples

   I once saw two males fighting together; each had a fore-leg laid across the neck of the other, and the rostrum bent quite in an attitude of defiance, and looking most ridiculous.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 277

   For example, the foreleg of the mole is admirably suited for digging underground. A similar modification is found in an entirely different group of the animal kingdom, namely, in the mole cricket[…] In both of these cases the adaptation is the more obvious, because, while the leg of the mole is formed on the same general plan as that of other vertebrates, and the leg of the mole cricket has the same fundamental structure as that of other insects, yet in both cases the details of structure and the general proportions have been so altered, that the leg is fitted for entirely different purposes from that to which the legs of other vertebrates and of other insects are put.

   1903, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Evolution and adaptation

   Synonyms: forelimb