primary
IPA: prˈaɪmɛri
noun
- A primary election; a preliminary election to select a political candidate of a political party.
- The first year of grade school.
- A base or fundamental component; something that is irreducible.
- The most massive component of a gravitationally bound system, such as a planet in relation to its satellites.
- A primary school.
- (ornithology) Any flight feather attached to the manus (hand) of a bird.
- A primary colour.
- (military) The first stage of a thermonuclear weapon, which sets off a fission explosion to help trigger a fusion reaction in the weapon's secondary stage.
- (aviation) A radar return from an aircraft (or other object) produced solely by the reflection of the radar beam from the aircraft's skin, without additional information from the aircraft's transponder.
- (medicine) The primary site of a disease; the original location or source of the disease.
- (electronics) A directly driven inductive coil, as in a transformer or induction motor that is magnetically coupled to a secondary.
verb
- (US, politics, transitive, intransitive) To challenge (an incumbent sitting politician) for their political party's nomination to run for re-election, through running a challenger campaign in a primary election, especially one that is more ideologically extreme.
- (US, intransitive, transitive) To take part in a primary election.
adjective
- First or earliest in a group or series.
- Main; principal; chief; placed ahead of others.
- (geology) Earliest formed; fundamental.
- (chemistry) Illustrating, possessing, or characterized by, some quality or property in the first degree; having undergone the first stage of substitution or replacement.
- (medicine) Relating to the place where a disorder or disease started to occur.
- (medicine) Relating to day-to-day care provided by health professionals such as nurses, general practitioners, dentists etc.
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Examples of "primary" in Sentences
- So the phrase "primary caregiver" was added to the bill.
- I think your question is, if the primary ends tomorrow, what happens to Obama's * primary* money.
- I personally dislike using the term primary care for internists, because of the misuse of this word.
- I use the term "primary" because the change process actually requires you make several changes, which means making supplement goals.
- The primary art is writing; primary, if we regard the purpose abstracted from the different modes of realizing it, those steps of progression of which the instances are still visible in the lower degrees of civilization.
- In the cables, the U.S. said it was concerned that North Korea helped one of its lenders, Tanchon Commercial Bank, which it describes as the "primary financial agent behind the DPRK's weapons programs," to funnel money from Syria and Iran through Arab Bank.
- Since the energy in the two circuits will be practically the same, it follows _that the ratio between the current in the primary and that in the secondary will be equal to the ratio of the number of turns in the secondary to the number of turns in the primary_.
- Politically, it probably makes sense, because his endorsement could put Hutchison over the top by securing the most uber-whacko votes in the primary, and since Democrats can't get their act together to find another Ann Richards, the primary is the only bit that will matter.
- In telephony, where the currents are not simple periodic currents, and where the variations in current strength take place at different rates, such a law as that just stated does not hold for all cases; but it may be stated in general that _the induced currents will be of higher voltage and smaller current strength than those of the primary in all coils where the secondary winding has a greater number of turns than the primary_, and _vice versâ_.
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