prefatory

• "The Court today tries to denigrate the importance of this [prefatory] clause of the Amendment by beginning its analysis with the Amendment's operative provision and returning to the preamble merely 'to ensure that our reading of the operative clause is consistent with the announced purpose,'" Justice Stevens wrote. —  Think Progress
• So, handing him a cigar, as a prefatory to conversation, I asked him our whereabouts. —  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858
• His work was evidently intended to furnish a more complete collection of the discourses of Jesus from oral tradition than any previously existing, with his own expositions; and this is plainly indicated by his own words, and by the title of his work, [Greek: Logiôn kuriakôn exęgęsis] [156:1 The natural and only reasonable course,' he adds in a note, 'is to believe the express declaration of Papias, more especially as it is made, in this instance, as a prefatory statement of his belief.' —  Essays on the work entitled "Supernatural Religion"
• So popes and emperors, monks and missionaries, German warriors and Roman warriors, minstrels and students, knights, crusaders, colonists, landskechts, and mercenaries are dragged in and made to do their part with all too evident fidelity to truth We owe much of our knowledge of Freytag's life to a charming autobiography which served as a prefatory volume to his collected works. —  The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12
• His own experience was this: that the Messrs. Appleton reprinted his first volume without compensation, asking him to furnish materials for a prefatory memoir, of which request he took no notice; afterwards, when the second volume was published, they sent him something, I believe fifty pounds. —  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 66, April, 1863

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the Same Context