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Belonging to a first birth; bearing young for the first time.

The first fruit; the first year's whole profit of an ecclesiastical preferment. The primitias of your parsonage. Spenser.

Being of the first production; primitive; original. [Obs.] Ainsworth.

pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first; as, primitive innocence; the primitive church. "Our primitive great sire." Milton.

Originally; at first.

Quality of being first; primitiveness. [Obs.] Bp. Pearson.

First; chief.

First born, made, or generated; original; primary; elemental; as, primogenial light. Glanvill.

The first ancestor; a forefather.

The state of being the firstborn of the same parents; seniority by birth among children of the same family.

The state or privileges of the firstborn. Burke.

First in order; primary; original; of earliest origin; as, primordial condition. "The primordial facts of our intelligent nature." Sir W. Hamilton.

At the beginning; under the first order of things; originally.

The first two long feathers of a hawk's wing. Spenser. J. H. Walsh.

First principles; fundamental beginnings; elements; as. Newton's Principia.

color. -- Nicol's prism, Nicol prism. Etym: [So called from Wm. Nicol, of Edinburgh, who first proposed it.] (Opt.) An instrument for experiments in polarization, consisting of a rhomb of Iceland spar, which has been bisected obliquely at a certain angle, and the two parts again joined with transparent cement, so that…

a star of the first magnitude in the constellation Canis Minor, or the Little Dog.

or whist, a way of playing at card parties, by which after every game, the losers at the first table go to the last table, and the winners at all the tables, except the first, move up to the next table. -- Progressive muscular atrophy (Med.), a nervous disorder characterized by continuous atrophy of the muscles. --…

A necessary truth or assumption; a first or assumed principle.

To assist or induce the action of; to move to action; to instigate; to incite. God first . . . prompted on the infirmities of the infant world by temporal prosperity. Jer. Taylor.