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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Preempt

Preempt \Pre*["e]mpt"\ (?; 215), v. t. & i. [imp. & p. p. Pre["e]mpted; p. pr. & vb. n. Pre["e]mpting.] [See Pre["e]mption.] To settle upon (public land) with a right of preemption, as under the laws of the United States; to take by pre["e]mption.

Wiktionary
preempt

alt. 1 (context transitive English) to appropriate something (before someone else does) 2 (context transitive English) to displace something, or take precedence over something 3 (context bridge intransitive English) to make a preemptive bid at bridge vb. 1 (context transitive English) to appropriate something (before someone else does) 2 (context transitive English) to displace something, or take precedence over something 3 (context bridge intransitive English) to make a preemptive bid at bridge

WordNet
preempt
  1. v. acquire by preemption

  2. make a preemptive bid

Wikipedia
Preempt

Preempt (also spelled "Pre-empt") is a bid in contract bridge whose primary objectives are (1) to thwart opponents' ability to bid to their best contract, with some safety, and (2) to fully describe one's hand to one's partner in a single bid. A preemptive bid is usually made by jumping, i.e. skipping one or more bidding levels. Since it deprives the opponents of the bidding space, it is expected that they will either find a wrong contract (too high or in a wrong denomination) of their own, or fail to find any. A preemptive bid often has the aim of a sacrifice, where a partnership bids a contract knowing it cannot be made, but assumes that (even when doubled), the penalty will still be smaller than the value of opponents' bid and made contract.

Usage examples of "preempt".

The White House had also kept Khalilzad in Ankara with instructions to use his skills to persuade the Turks not to send troops into northern Iraq in an attempt to preempt any Kurdish move to declare independence.

Network Row, we are preempting Eyeball to Eyeball with Cheeta Ching for a special live 24 Hours.

For more than two decades the FBI had been charged with preempting terror threats on American ground, but when it came to al Qaeda, the Bureau was, in effect, two for four: they had foiled the Day of Terror and Bojinka plots, but they had failed to stop Yousef the first time in 1993, and they missed the intel on the two East African embassy bombings of 1998.

The courts have frequently debated whether laws of unfair competition are similar enough to copyright jurisdiction in its aims to be preempted by Federal copyright law, to which defendant argues that preemption is not absolute in the area of intellectual property.

She was able to slip away with Rusgann Moorcock, the sturdy, plainspoken tirewoman who had become her personal maid during the pilgrimage, after Queen Cataldise preempted the services of both ladies-in-waiting.

I had to sit out there with him while he dragged me through the whole thing again, Father getting furious when he saw that lower court decision where Mudpye put one over on that stupid woman judge and what fools we were not to spot the trap they laid for us letting us sue in district court here instead of California preempting the Federal statutes and getting it in under New York law and not even following through with an appeal, what kind of nitwits were my lawyers anyhow?

It also preempted an appointment authority that properly belonged to Chesty, as commander of the Occupation Army.

It had not been hand-to-hand work—just shipboard stuff, the Star Force ship going in low to preempt the little Phorcys-based raiders who had attacked Ordinen, Eraklion's biggest open-cast mine—but the marines assigned to Callirhoe managed to make it sound like the Second Galactic War when they came aboard that night for the usual "two-ships" social.

Chili peppers, squashes, amaranths, and chenopods are other crops of which different but related species were domesticated in Mesoamerica and South America, since no species was able to spread fast enough to preempt the others.

She coasted over to Pham Trinli’s maps, preempting whatever more Trinli had to say.

That rapid spread preempted opportunities for domesticating those and related species in the Balkans.

Evidence for just a single domestication thus suggests that, once a wild plant had been domesticated, the crop spread quickly to other areas throughout the wild plant's range, preempting the need for other independent domestications of the same plant.

Recall that most Fertile Crescent crops prove, upon genetic study, to derive from only a single domestication process, whose resulting crop spread so quickly that it preempted any other incipient domestications of the same or related species.

While Fertile Crescent crops spread west and east sufficiently fast to preempt independent domestication of the same species or else domestication of closely related species elsewhere, the barriers within the Americas gave rise to many such parallel domestications of crops.

Evidence for just a single domestication thus suggests that, once a wild plant had been domesticated, the crop spread quickly to other areas throughout the wild plant’s range, preempting the need for other independent domestications of the same plant.