What is "pre-empt"

Usage examples of "pre-empt".

Usually it was pre-empted by the boy whose father rented the store on the ground floor.

If he was lucky enough to get there (where there were but ten lavatories for five hundred children), he'd find the places pre-empted by the ten most brutalized children in the school.

But she hated her because she pre-empted those free hours, a few of which would have made Francie happy.

They would wait patiently as he plunged through the air and destroyed them exactly, the carnage of each step pre-empted by the spiders themselves, queuing up to die.

Todd had pre-empted Hrriss's company and, with Bill Moody and another cub, had gone off to the village to play some Hrruban game.

Well, Third did exactly as First hoped he would when he threw the circuits wide open on Rrala and pre-empted all communication channels.

Even in the final chapter, Heath pre-empted the laboratory science, so Od was still a political officer.

Od, too, pre-empted one person for one sequence: Lieutenant Khoyzyanov of the marines, at the grain elevator.

Then, seeing what it meant, he looked across at his lieutenant, pre-empting him, stopping him from pressing the general alarm that would wake the whole palace.

From his perspective, the UN DISA people merely aped his employer’s actions on a smaller scale—in hope of pre-empting them.

For quite apart from Thikkoul's predictions - even despite them, anticipating or pre-empting them - he had after all travelled the length of the known world in order to do just that.

Saul opened his mouth to speak, but King Rat's voice emerged from the darkness, pre-empting him.

Is it the fact that at Geneva he maintains--owns and operates--an electronic contraption, a fail-safe gimcrack which, in a crisis, pre-empts Holt and Harenzany in their management of the totality of the world's leadies?