a. [f. FORETHOUGHT sb. + -FUL.] Full of or having forethought; thoughtful for the future, provident.
1809–10. Coleridge, The Friend (1818), III. 205. Some self-consistent anticipation as the ground of the ‘prudens quæstio’ (the forethoughtful query), which he [Lord Bacon] affirms to be the prior half of the knowledge sought, dimidium scientiæ.
1853. Lytton, Harold, X. vi. (ed. 3), 240. But whether, knowing what hath passed, ye may not deem it safer for the land to elect another king,—that it is which, free and fore-thoughtful [ed. 1 (1848), prethoughtful] of every chance, ye should now decide.
1876. G. Meredith, Beauch. Career, II. iii. 48. Party against party, neither of them had a forethoughtful head for the land at large.
Hence Forethoughtfully adv.; Forethoughtfulness.
1647. J. Trapp, Comm. Matt. vi. 34. Let us mannage the affairs, and master the miseries of the present day; and not, by too much fore-thoughtfulness, and painful pre-conceit, suffer fained or future evils before they seize upon us.
1874. Dykes, Relations of the Kingdom, 71. It is the privilege of his nobility that he can be, up to a given point, a fellow-worker with God in that needful toil, and in that moral forethoughtfulness, and even in that artistic skill, by which creature existence is both sustained and adorned.
1891. G. Meredith, One of our Conq., III. v. 84. After pacing up and down between briny gulls and a polka-band, he made his way forethoughtfully to the glass-sheltered seats fronting East.
