From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Foreground \Fore"ground'\, noun On a painting, and sometimes in a bas-relief, mosaic picture, or the like, that part of the scene represented, which is nearest to the spectator, and therefore occupies the lowest part of the work of art itself. Cf. {Distance}, noun, 6.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
noun
1: the part of a scene that is near the viewer
2: (computer science) a window for an active application
verb
1: move into the foreground to make more visible or prominent; "The introduction highlighted the speaker's distinguished career in linguistics" [syn: {highlight}, {spotlight}, {play up}] [ant: {background}, {background}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
53 Moby Thesaurus words for "foreground": anteriority, approach, approximation, bold front, brave face, brave front, closeness, confines, convergence, display, environs, facade, face, facet, facia, fore, forefront, forehand, foreland, forepart, forequarter, foreside, foreword, front, front elevation, front man, front matter, front page, front view, frontage, frontal, frontier, frontispiece, head, heading, immediacy, immediate foreground, lap, nearness, neighborhood, nighness, obverse, precinct, preface, prefix, priority, propinquity, proscenium, proximity, purlieus, vicinage, vicinity, window dressing
From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:
foreground vt. [Unix; common] To bring a task to the top of one's {stack} for immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks. "If your presentation is due next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design document."
Technically, on a time-sharing system, a task executing in foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to the user; oppose {background}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {{Unix}}, but it appears first to have been used in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes simultaneously reading the keyboard is a good way to {lose}.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:
foreground (Unix) On a {time-sharing} system, a task executing in foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to the user in contrast to one running in the {background}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {Unix}, but it appears first to have been used in this sense on {OS/360}. Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or terminal window). Having multiple processes simultaneously reading the keyboard is confusing. [{Jargon File}] (1994-10-24)
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