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foreplay

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈfɔː(ɹ)pleɪ//

The acts at the beginning of a (usually human) sexual encounter that serve to build up sexual arousal.

noun

  1. 1

    The acts at the beginning of a (usually human) sexual encounter that serve to build up sexual arousal.

    Actually in quick undressing or actual lovemaking modern nylons usually get ruined, but if you keep your nails and fingers smooth taking them off gently makes good foreplay, along with mutual undressing generally.

    Root (Amy Acker): Hey, sweetie, you busy? / Sameen Shaw (Sarah Shahi): A little. Skip the verbal foreplay, Root. Why you calling? / Root: Can't a couple of gals take a little break from work to catch up?

Etymology

From fore- + play.

verb

  1. 1

    To engage in foreplay.

    I decided, while we were foreplaying, that I must get a supply, just in case.

    We grabbed each other, roughly kissing and tossing covers and pillows about in our frantic lovemaking. We foreplayed and foreplayed, teased and teased again.

    While they were making love? It was true they weren't actually engaged in intercourse, but this certainly counted as foreplay. Iakovos stared down at her in complete disbelief. He'd never, ever had a woman fall asleep while he was foreplaying.

Forms

past tense
foreplayed
past participle
foreplayed
present participle
foreplaying
third person singular
foreplays
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).