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What is "pre-existing"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pre-existing
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ If the database contains pre-existing original works normal rules apply.
▪ In this kind of case, pre-existing acquaintances were invalidated.
▪ It also stops them refusing cover for more than a year to those with pre-existing conditions.
▪ On the one hand, nucleic acids arise only as copies of pre-existing nucleic acids.
▪ Replacive minerals grow, as their name suggests, in the place of pre-existing minerals and not into pore spaces.
▪ The Act effects several important changes to the pre-existing law.
▪ This deposit mantles the flanks of the pre-existing cone, but is no more than a few metres thick at most.
▪ This division to some degree reflected the pre-existing division of opinion on the Poor Law and its desirable replacement.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pre-existing

also preexisting, 1590s, past participle adjective from pre-exist. The medical insurance pre-existing condition is attested from 1942.

Wiktionary
pre-existing

alt. (present participle of pre-exist English) (alternative spelling of preexisting English) vb. (present participle of pre-exist English) (alternative spelling of preexisting English)

WordNet
pre-existing

adj. existing previously or before something; "variations on pre-existent musical themes" [syn: preexistent, pre-existent, preexisting]

Usage examples of "pre-existing".

It's easy enough to see that a coin is neither 'heads' nor 'tails' while it's still up in the air, spinning-but what if it's not even any particular coin7 What if there really are no pre-existing laws governing the system you're about to measure .

They might still have furnished an antidote, their own pre-existing magic bullet.

Later, they could form an (inappropriate, of course) association between this pre-existing representation of the bead in their brain and the sensation of sickness, and hence avoid the green bead when offered it again.

Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing knowledge, or he could not have got on at all.

Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms.

If, on the other hand, we view 'Persistent Types' in relation to that hypothesis which supposes the species living at any time to be the result of the gradual modification of pre-existing species a hypothesis which, though unproven, and sadly damaged by some of its supporters, is yet the only one to which physiology lends any countenance.

This view of the relation of species in one region to those in another, does not differ much (by substituting the word variety for species) from that lately advanced in an ingenious paper by Mr Wallace, in which he concludes, that `every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

Their role had been to restore, maintain and unify a pre-existing network.