front matter

noun

: matter preceding the main text of a book

Examples of front matter in a Sentence

The conventions of the book are explained in the front matter.

Recent Examples on the Web

My group chat has a recurring debate about epigraphs, and during one of its iterations, a novelist friend said that epigraphs should simply be put into the book: not as front matter, but in the book itself. —Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, 16 Jan. 2025

Add pages for the front matter, back matter, index, glossary and other content. —Peter Gregory, Forbes, 16 Mar. 2023

The front matter includes an alphabetical list of contributors, along with their professions, but none of their credits or even their studio affiliations. —Farran Smith Nehme, WSJ, 18 Nov. 2022

Literary superstars such as Taylor have been eager to take on the role of both guide and medium, providing front matter that links the past with the present by placing classic texts in a contemporary context. —Je Banach, The Atlantic, 8 Sep. 2022

Paging through this front matter feels like waiting for a haunted carnival ride to start, only to be wrong-footed. —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 31 Oct. 2019

Some of Richard McGuire’s sequences are taxonomies: bird cages, hats, ice, or the collection of wire shapes that decorates the front matter of this book. —The New York Review of Books, 13 Oct. 2016

Word History

First Known Use

1870, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for front matter

• backscatter
• antimatter
• atter
• batter
• blatter
• catarrh
• chatter
• clatter
• fatter
• flatter
• hatter
• latter