[f. FORE- pref. + SHORE.]
1. The fore part of the shore; that part which lies between the high- and low-water marks; occas. the ground lying between the edge of the water and the land which is cultivated or built upon.
1764. Skeffling Inclos. Act, 13. Land or ground, as a new fore shore to the said river.
1839. Stonehouse, Axholme, 56. They [salmon] frequently get fast on stone heaps which are put out for the defence of the fore-shores.
1864. J. G. Bertram, in Galton, ed., Notes of Travel in 1862–3, 69. The moment the tide runs back the foreshore is at once overrun with a legion of hungry people, who are eager to clutch at whatever fishy débris the receding water may have left.
1894. Sala, Lond. up to date, xxiv. 360. The circumstance that so many grand patrician houses existed on this foreshore [of the Thames] from Essex Street right down to Hungerford was probably the reason why Sir Christopher Wren, after the Great Fire, only proposed that the ‘commodious quay’ which he projected should extend from Blackfriars to the Tower.
transf. 1874. T. Hardy, Madding Crowd, II. i. 15. The dark rotundity of the earth approached the foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud which bounded a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky, amaranthine glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled her round to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape of indecisive and palpitating stars.
2. Hydraul. Engin. (See quot. 1874.)
1841. Brees, Gloss. Civ. Engin., 34. D, the foreshore.
1873. F. Robertson, Engineering Notes, 61. A slope is carried from the bottom up to near low-water mark of 3 to 1, terminating in a long nearly level berm called a foreshore.
1874. Knight, Dict. Mech., I. 905/1. Fore-shore. (Hydraulic Engineering.) a. A bank a little distance from a sea-wall to break the force of the surf. b. the seaward projecting, slightly inclined portion of a breakwater.
