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Primary vs Priority - What's the difference?

primary | priority |

As nouns the difference between primary and priority

is that primary is a primary election; a preliminary election to select a political candidate of a political party while priority is an item's relative importance.

As an adjective primary

is the first in a group or series.

As a verb primary

is to take part in a primary election.

primary

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • The first in a group or series.
  • Children attend primary school, and teenagers attend secondary school.
  • * Bishop Pearson
  • the church of Christ, in its primary institution
  • * John Locke
  • These I call original, or primary , qualities of body.
  • Main; principal; placed ahead of others.
  • Preferred stock has primary claim on dividends, ahead of common stock.
  • (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.
  • (label) idiopathic
  • Derived terms

    * primarily * primary care * primary color, primary colour * primary producer * primary research * primary school * primary source

    See also

    * first * primus inter pares * secondary (2) * tertiary (3) * quaternary (4)

    Noun

    (primaries)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • (ornithology) Any flight feather attached to the manus (hand) of a bird.
  • 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.
  • (electronics) A directly driven inductive coil, as in a transformer or induction motor that is magnetically coupled to a secondary
  • Verb

  • (US) To take part in a primary election.
  • (US, politics) To challenge an incumbent sitting politician for their political party's endorsement to run for re-election, through running a challenger campaign in a primary election
  • priority

    Noun

    (priorities)
  • An item's relative importance.
  • He set his e-mail message's priority to high.
  • A goal of a person or an organisation.
  • She needs to get her priorities straight and stop playing games.
  • (taxonomy, of a name) A superior claim to use by virtue of being validly published at an earlier date.
  • *
  • Neither [Jones] nor I (in 1966) could conceive of reducing our "science" to the ultimate absurdity of reading Finnish newspapers almost a century and a half old in order to establish "priority ."
  • (obsolete) Precedence; superior rank.
  • * 1608 , , I. i. 244:
  • Follow Cominius. We must follow you. / Right worthy you priority.

    Derived terms

    * aperture priority * prioritise / prioritize * prioritization * shutter priority * top priority