Borrowed from Latin prīmārius, from prīmus (first; whence the English - adjective prime) + -ārius (whence the English - suffix -ary); compare the French primaire, primer, and premier.

• (British) IPA: /ˈpɹaɪməɹi/
• (America) enPR: prīʹmĕr-ē, IPA: /ˈpɹaɪˌmɛɹi/ or enPR: prīʹmə-rē, IPA: /ˈpɹaɪməɹi/
• (New Zealand) IPA: /ˈpɹaɪm(ə)ɹiː/

primary

1. First or earliest in a group or series.

   Children attend primary school, and teenagers attend secondary school.

   • 1659, John Pearson, Exposition of the Creed:

     the church of Christ, in its primary institution

   • 1689 (indicated as 1690), [John Locke], An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. […], London: […] Eliz[abeth] Holt, for Thomas Basset, […], →OCLC ↗:
     , Book II, Chapter VIII

     These I call original, or primary, qualities of body.

2. Main; principal; chief; placed ahead of others.

   Preferred stock has primary claim on dividends, ahead of common stock.

3. (geology) Earliest formed; fundamental.
4. (chemistry) Illustrating, possessing, or characterized by, some quality or property in the first degree; having undergone the first stage of substitution or replacement.
5. (medicine) Relating to the place where a disorder or disease started to occur.
6. (medicine) Relating to day-to-day care provided by health professionals such as nurses, general practitioners, dentists etc.

• French: primaire
• Portuguese: primário, primária, primários, primárias
• Russian: перви́чный
• Spanish: primario

• French: prioritaire
• German: primär
• Italian: primario
• Portuguese: primário
• Russian: перви́чный
• Spanish: primario

primary (plural primaries)

1. (political science) A primary election; a preliminary election to select a political candidate of a political party.
2. The first year of grade school.
3. A base or fundamental component; something that is irreducible.
4. The most massive component of a gravitationally bound system, such as a planet in relation to its satellites.
5. A primary school.
   • 2001, David Woods, Martyn Cribb, Effective LEAs and school improvement:

     Excellence in Cities offers a further development of this approach, whereby secondary schools operate with small clusters of primaries as mini-EAZs.

6. (ornithology) Any flight feather attached to the manus (hand) of a bird.
7. A primary colour.
   • 2003, Julie A Jacko, Andrew Sears, The human-computer interaction handbook:

     By adding and subtracting the three primaries, cyan, yellow, and magenta are produced. These are called subtractive primaries.

8. (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.
9. (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.
10. (medicine) The primary site of a disease; the original location or source of the disease.

    unknown primary

    most common primaries

11. (electronics) A directly driven inductive coil, as in a transformer or induction motor that is magnetically coupled to a secondary.

• German: Vorwahl
• Spanish: primarias

• Spanish: primaria, primero

• Spanish: básico

• German: Handschwinge

primary (primaries, present participle primarying; simple past and past participle primaried)

1. (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.
2. (US, intransitive, transitive) To take part in a primary election.