primary
Listen:Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
primary/ˈprʌɪməri/
▶adjective
- 1 of chief importance; principal.
- 2 earliest in time or order.
■ (Primary) Geology former term for Palaeozoic.
- 3 not caused by or based on anything else.
- 4 chiefly Brit. relating to or denoting education for children between the ages of about five and eleven.
- 5 of or denoting the input side of a transformer or other inductive device.
- 6 Chemistry (of an organic compound) having its functional group on a carbon atom bonded to no more than one other carbon atom.
■ derived from ammonia by replacement of one hydrogen atom by an organic group.
- 1 (in the US) a preliminary election to appoint delegates to a party conference or to select the candidates for a principal, especially presidential, election.
- 2 Astronomy the body orbited by a smaller body.
– origin ME: from L. primarius, from primus ‘first’.
'primary' also found in these Oxford entries:
additive
- after-effect
- ancillary
- anode
- apo-
- associationism
- autotransformer
- Cassegrain telescope
- cathode
- commodity
- connotation
- connote
- coprocessor
- cyan
- dame school
- day
- dayside
- dichromatism
- electron
- elementary
- elementary school
- environmentalist
- first-order
- flight feather
- fundamental
- Gregorian telescope
- haemocoel
- hereditarian
- humour
- id
- indirect object
- insure
- intuitionism
- magenta
- mainframe
- metastasis
- minimal
- National Guard
- neoplasticism
- oogonium
- opus Dei
- PCT
- perquisite
- pinna
- positive
- primary care
- primary colour
- primary feather
- primary industry
