Footnote

//ˈfʊtˌnoʊt// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A short piece of text, often numbered, placed at the bottom of a printed page, that adds a comment, citation, reference etc, to a designated part of the main text.

    "consult the footnotes for more details"

  2. 2
    a printed note placed below the text on a printed page wordnet
  3. 3
    An event of lesser importance than some larger event to which it is related. broadly

    "a mere footnote in history"

  4. 4
    A qualification to the import of something.
Verb
  1. 1
    To add footnotes to a text.

    "She does everything she does with a kind of terrifying thoroughness, footnoted and bibliographied, as it were, down to the smallest detail."

  2. 2
    add explanatory notes to or supply with critical comments wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
annotateadversariaaide-memoireannotateannotationapparatus criticus

Example

More examples

"The footnote was too small that it went unnoticed by the readers."

Etymology

From foot + note.

Related phrases

reference mark

More for "footnote"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.