thwart

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

to prevent something from happening
preventVaccination will prevent the spread of the disease.
avoidLabel the boxes to avoid confusion.
stopThis should stop any further trouble.
avertWe had to act quickly to avert disaster.
prohibitBehavioural problems in the classroom prohibit learning.
checkChildren are being vaccinated in an attempt to check the spread of the disease.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Preventing and impeding
anti-drug
anti-jamming
avoid
avoidable
avoidably
fireproof
flameproof
guard against something
hamper
hang
have someone/something hanging round your neckidiom
head off
preclusion
preclusive
prejudice
prevent
preventable
scuttle
smother
suffocate

foil | American Dictionary

foil
noun
us/fɔɪl/

foilnoun (METAL SHEET)

[ U ]
a very thin sheet of metal, used esp. for wrapping food:
aluminum foil

foilnoun (COMPARISON)

[ C ]
someone or something that makes another’s good or bad qualities all the more noticeable:
The older, cynical character in the play is the perfect foil for the innocent William.

foilnoun (BLADE)

[ C ]
a thin, light weapon with a long blade used in the sport of fencing
foil
verb[ T ]
us/fɔɪl/

foilverb[T] (PREVENT)

to prevent someone or something from being successful:
An attempted coup against the country’s military ruler was foiled yesterday.
FOIL
noun[ U ]
us/fɔɪl/
mathematics
abbreviation for first, outer, inner, last, the rule for multiplying two binomials (= statements that have two numbers or symbols each)

Examples of foil

foil
Multiple scattering calculations on ions passing through thin amorphous foils.
A thin vacuum gap separates the cobalt and copper foils from each other and thus electrons are held back by self-generated fields.
Perforated support foils with pre-defined hole size, shape and arrangement.
Enhancement of proton acceleration by hot-electron recirculation in thin foils irradiated by ultraintense laser pulses.
Each plate consisted of four illustrations, one representing the target item and three representing foils.
Students judged 50 % of altered foils and 23 % of new foils to be actual personal events.
Many of the standard phonological awareness tasks used with young children include semantically related distractors as foils.
Any attempts to introduce interesting new methods of assessment and testing were foiled by limitations in the memory size and processing speed of the computers.
In the field of architecture where advancement through research is foiled by minuscule sponsorship, progress is also minuscule.
We simulated the explosion of a couple of plastic foils with different thickness.
In contrast to the transpor t in non-conducting targets, the electron transpor t in metal foils seems to be free from instabilities.
The target consisted of gold, aluminium, and plastic foils of millimeter size, and varying thickness from 5 to 100 mm.
Optimization of ion acceleration in the interaction of intense femtosecond laser pulses with ultrathin foils.
Interaction of femtosecond laser pulses with ultrathin foils.
Integration of story information during comprehension was indexed by inflated recognition errors of foils that had been constructed by integrating information across original story sentences.
See all examples of foil
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.