Definition of "footnote" []

• A note placed at the bottom of a page of a book or manuscript that comments on or cites a reference for a designated part of the text. (noun)
• Something related to but of lesser importance than a larger work or occurrence: a political scandal that was but a footnote to modern history. (noun)
• To furnish with or comment on in footnotes. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Finally, the economic character of purchasing health care would seem to require careful pause before considering it to be encompassed within the right to privacy, as the very sentence this footnote is appended to: “[T] he existence of facts supporting the legislative judgment is to be presumed, for regulatory legislation affecting ordinary commercial transactions is not to be pronounced unconstitutional unless, in the light of the facts made known or generally assumed, it is of such a character as to preclude the assumption that it rests upon some rational basis within the knowledge and experience of the legislators.”"
• "(Gibbon tells us, in footnote 47 to chapter III, that he actually gave public philosophy lectures, as Emperor, in Rome, Greece and Asia; presumably we have here some of the raw materials for those lectures.)"
• "NOTE: A point that I wanted to raise in my last post, in the second footnote, is that in Avatar, form supports and mirrors the story and its central themes -- one of which is to "see" differently, to look with a new perspective."