front matter

1. 1.

   written matter preceding the main text of a book

   Synonymsprelims

   Broadermatter

Questions about front matter

What does front matter mean?

front matter means "written matter preceding the main text of a book".

What is another word for front matter?

Close synonyms include prelims. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is front matter a common word?

front matter is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.