Definition of "preposition" [prep•o•si•tion]

• A word or phrase placed typically before a substantive and indicating the relation of that substantive to a verb, an adjective, or another substantive, as English at, by, with, from, and in regard to. (noun)
• To position or place in position in advance: artillery that was prepositioned at strategic points in the desert. (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.

• "Some one once pointed out that the preposition is a dangerous thing."
• "Maybe this comes from my years of Latin in college or maybe it comes from a broken synapse in my frontal lobe, but ending a sentence in a preposition is just something I have decided not to do."
• "In French the preposition is followed by a feminine noun (the masculine form is au, a contraction of à + le), but as an English compound preposition it is independent of gender:"