avant la lettre

Borrowed from French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”).

• "Suffragettes were feminists avant la lettre."
• "Could the Greeks of that time, whose minds were frustrated and demoralized by defeat and misery, be expected to give a welcome to those premature Quakers and to those Tolstoyans “avant la lettre”?"
• "How is it, then, that Flaubert was a somber impressionist avant la lettre, when the school of painters was remarkably cheerful with the exception of both Degas and Van Gogh?"
• "as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre"
• "a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef."
• "One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous"
• "You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre."

• retronym
• proto
• proto-