Definition of "prestress"

prestress

verb
third-person singular simple present prestresses, present participle prestressing, simple past and past participle prestressed
1. (construction) To apply stress to structural components in order to produce a tension that counteracts the loads to which the component is subjected in its designed use.
adjective
not comparable
1. (linguistics) Before a stress (emphasis placed on a syllable of a word).
  Quotations
  Thus, the acute accent is typically characterized by an F0-maximum in the prestress syllable and an F0-minimum in the stressed syllable, while for the grave accent the corresponding F0-maximum occurs in the stressed syllable and the F0-minimum in the poststress syllable.
  1996, Ann M. Peters, Sven Strömqvist, “The Role of Prosody in the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes”, in James L. Morgan, Katherine Demuth, editors, Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping From Speech To Grammar in Early Acquisition, New York, NY: Psychology Press, published 2014, page 217