Forerunner

1. n. A piece of rag terminating the log line.
2. n. A messenger sent before to give notice of the approach of others; a harbinger; a sign foreshowing something; a prognostic; as, the forerunner of a fever.
3. n. A predecessor; an ancestor.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.