primitive
adjective
No English definition recorded for this entry.
L253344 on Wikidata ↗noun
- (of a lineage or taxon) one that is inherited from the common ancestor of a clade (or clade group) and has undergone little change since
Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /ˈpɹɪmɪtɪv/
adj
Etymology: From Middle English primitif, from Old French primitif, from Latin prīmitīvus (“first or earliest of its kind”), from prīmus (“first”); see prime. Doublet of primitivo.
- Of or pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first.
“primitive innocence; the primitive church”
“it is from such primitive beings that the highest organisms now extant are the marvellously developed descendants”
- Of or pertaining to or harking back to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity.
“a primitive style of dress”
“By some paradoxical evolution rancour and intolerance have been established in the vanguard of primitive Christianity. Mrs. Spoker, in common with many of the stricter disciples of righteousness, was as inclement in demeanour as she was cadaverous in aspect.”
- Of or pertaining to or harking back to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity.
“I used primitive hearts to decorate the quilt.”
- Crude, obsolete.
“primitive ideas”
- Original; primary; radical; not derived.
“a primitive verb”
“The primitive root in "children" is "child."”
- Occurring in or characteristic of an early stage of development or evolution.
- Not derived from another of the same type
- most recent common ancestor (often hypothetical) of
“We infer that other groups of related languages, such as the Germanic (or the Slavic or the Celtic), which show a similar resemblance, have arisen in the same way; it is only an accident of history that for these groups we have no written records of the earlier state of the language, as it was spoken before the differentiation set in. To these unrecorded languages we give names like Primitive Germanic (Primitive Slavic, Primitive Celtic, and so on).”
noun
Etymology: From Middle English primitif, from Old French primitif, from Latin prīmitīvus (“first or earliest of its kind”), from prīmus (“first”); see prime. Doublet of primitivo.
- An original or primary word; a word not derived from another, as opposed to derivative.
- A member of a primitive society.
- Primitive or primeval nature; the innate, instinctive element within a person; the deep, instinctive, precultural layer of human nature.
“It may be that, living among primitive surroundings, the dormant primitive deep within the white man is drawn towards the absolute primitive in the aboriginal.”
- Natural or premodern environment or conditions; life lacking modern technology and society.
“Out there in the primitive, white-man Rust had made his tools out of the primitive, as these stone-age people were making excellent string from the primitive.”
- A simple-minded person.
- A data type that is built into the programming language, as opposed to more complex structures.
- Any of the simplest elements (instructions, statements, etc.) available in a programming language.
“A write-what-where primitive allows the attacker to write arbitrary data wherever they want in the memory”
- A basic geometric shape from which more complex shapes can be constructed.
- A function whose derivative is a given function; an antiderivative.