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What is "primitive"

Crossword clues for primitive

primitive
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
primitive
I.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a primitive civilization (=one that is not at all advanced)
▪ His main interest was primitive civilizations.
a primitive society
▪ In almost all primitive societies, volcanoes have been regarded with fear.
a primitive/simple creature (=one with only a few cells)
▪ primitive creatures like bacteria
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
art
▪ The interest in primitive art had come about largely, of course, through the work of Gauguin.
▪ In the 1980s Jacques Kerchache, a former dealer, collector and connoisseur of primitive art, took up the cudgels again.
▪ Picasso's instinctive appreciation of the aesthetic principles of trial art was indicative of a new attitude towards primitive art.
▪ Moreover the government is building, at considerable cost, a museum at Quai de Branly devoted to primitive art.
▪ Through him, more than through any other single force, the aesthetic worth of primitive art forms came to be recognized.
▪ They have always refused to place primitive art on the same plane as the work of Western artists.
▪ This attitude was, of course, purely subjective, and their appreciation of primitive art was almost entirely emotional.
▪ What I say is roughly this: primitive art as we call it, tribal art, is usually very good.
church
▪ The primitive church employed mythology to augment and explicate the great truths of the gospel.
▪ In it the founders dissolved also their own presbytery and headed back for their model to the ideal primitive church.
▪ Ironically we find that this mixture of heathenism and paganism is rather like living in the primitive church.
culture
▪ Hence the study of primitive culture is intimately bound up with that of primitive religion.
▪ Almost all anthropologists have followed suit, speaking of primitive cultures as compared with the civilizations that more developed societies have evolved.
▪ Town and country here are engaged in the age-old dialogue between advanced civilizations and primitive cultures.
form
▪ It is spectacular even in its present, relatively primitive form.
▪ These simple, single-celled creatures are the most primitive forms of life on earth.
▪ It would he hard to imagine a more primitive form of music than stamping on the ground.
▪ There are, however, other primitive forms of life that can flourish under such conditions.
▪ I take it that some very primitive form of life arose spontaneously on earth from chance combinations of atoms.
▪ The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen.
level
▪ Before long, I saw more signs of agriculture, on a pathetically primitive level.
▪ This shows the limiting effects of fixations to primitive levels of development, engaged in out of fear.
▪ The child can be seen as constructing knowledge at a primitive level, trying to make sense of the surrounding world.
man
▪ It has been used in baking and brewing ever since primitive man became domesticated.
▪ Do you know how primitive man generated fire?
▪ As Lévy-Bruhl pointed out, primitive men saw the chirping of crickets and crying of birds in spring as appeals for rain.
▪ They had no meaning for primitive man.
▪ Other themes, such as the importance of the shadow to primitive man, flicker through these lines.
▪ No doubt, primitive man had slept in the open.
▪ Of course primitive man was a sun worshipper.
▪ In that infinitely remote time primitive man could Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea.
people
▪ The old anthropological concept dreamed up in the universities to describe the potentialities of nature as understood by primitive people.
▪ After all, these were the most primitive people of all, our earliest ancestors.
▪ They're embarrassed to have such primitive people represent the country to the rest of the world.
▪ I know of no primitive people anywhere that either rejects and despises conflict or represents warfare as an absolute evil.
▪ This would not seem strange to primitive people at all.
peoples
▪ More than any others, so-called primitive peoples are receptive to nature and model their life and attitudes upon it.
▪ A number of authoritative scholars seriously question the propriety of interpreting prehistoric remains by reference to the customs of modern primitive peoples.
▪ It seems that primitive peoples ate human flesh for broadly two reasons.
▪ All the islands, including even Java, harbour primitive peoples, often still living in stone-age conditions.
▪ Like all primitive peoples they believed in spirits with influence over human life.
▪ Between the civilized areas, those occupied by primitive peoples are also the domain of wild animals.
▪ The West, by contrast, assimilated its own primitive peoples very early on.
religion
▪ Hence the study of primitive culture is intimately bound up with that of primitive religion.
ritual
▪ The Waste Land itself functions as a primitive ritual.
▪ She was absorbed in the primitive ritual of the hunt and work was erased from her mind.
▪ He was also concerned with primitive ritual as underlying developed ritual.
▪ But it seems that his interest in primitive ritual had led him to place his own stress on life as a ritual.
society
▪ As a result there ceases to exist unalloyed the direct feedback, characteristic of primitive societies, between natural conditions and consciousness.
▪ But trade in slaves has been a universal phenomenon, affecting all primitive societies.
▪ Teheran, by contrast was a poor and primitive society in those days.
▪ Thus virtually every primitive society divides the children and teaches the sexes separately.
▪ He pointed out that the latency period is absent in primitive societies and is found only in higher cultures.
▪ In primitive societies men have the compensation of physical strength.
▪ This type of simplistic explanation of primitive societies has dogged Marxist anthropology since Engels's time.
▪ In primitive societies, practice for Bourdieu must then primarily be about strategy.
tribe
▪ Even primitive tribes when dancing submit to the discipline imposed by their leaders.
▪ The ill are no longer ostracized as moral pariahs except by a few remaining primitive tribes ruled by superstition.
▪ To primitive tribes a head, stuck on a pole at the village boundary, averted evil and brought luck.
▪ The law of the survival of the fitted governed not only primitive tribes, but the civilized cultures of the ancient world.
▪ First, of course, you have to locate your most primitive tribe.
▪ Iii any primitive tribe, rule by male fighters is the most natural form of government.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ primitive machinery
▪ primitive man
▪ a primitive design
▪ fossils of primitive algae
▪ In those days, dental equipment was primitive and a visit to the dentist was a painful experience.
▪ It is a primitive but effective device for raising water from a well.
▪ Mead's research focused on three primitive New Guinea tribes.
▪ The cabin is primitive and lacks running water.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But how did primitive life-forms first appear on Earth?
▪ It was basic, primitive and very, very real.
▪ She was threatened, and the primitive male instinct to protect what was his brought his entire body to battle-readiness within seconds.
▪ The discovery of this conodont-bearing animal suggests that at least some conodonts may be among the most primitive of vertebrates.
▪ The gingerbread house represents an existence based on the most primitive satisfactions.
▪ They are among the most primitive on bony fish, though their skeleton consists largely of cartilage.
▪ This was barter, the most primitive capitalism, and this was what we were fighting to protect.
▪ We also stopped to hike on a primitive trail, up and over a short ridge to a small, isolated lake.
II.noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Besides, you write in Yiddish, a language no one except a few primitives can understand.
▪ Brown said he saw Adam and Eve in a remote-viewing session, but they were not naked primitives in a lush garden.
▪ The primitive was often underscored by social Darwinism.
▪ They are the unfortunate primitives or fools: we know much better than that!
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Primitive

Primitive \Prim"i*tive\, a. [L. primitivus, fr. primus the first: cf. F. primitif. See Prime, a.]

  1. Of or pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first; as, primitive innocence; the primitive church. ``Our primitive great sire.''
    --Milton.

  2. Of or pertaining to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity; as, a primitive style of dress.

  3. Original; primary; radical; not derived; as, primitive verb in grammar.

    Primitive axes of co["o]rdinate (Geom.), that system of axes to which the points of a magnitude are first referred, with reference to a second set or system, to which they are afterward referred.

    Primitive chord (Mus.), that chord, the lowest note of which is of the same literal denomination as the fundamental base of the harmony; -- opposed to derivative.
    --Moore (Encyc. of Music).

    Primitive circle (Spherical Projection), the circle cut from the sphere to be projected, by the primitive plane.

    Primitive colors (Paint.), primary colors. See under Color.

    Primitive Fathers (Eccl.), the acknowledged Christian writers who flourished before the Council of Nice, A. D. 325.
    --Shipley.

    Primitive groove (Anat.), a depression or groove in the epiblast of the primitive streak. It is not connected with the medullary groove, which appears later and in front of it.

    Primitive plane (Spherical Projection), the plane upon which the projections are made, generally coinciding with some principal circle of the sphere, as the equator or a meridian.

    Primitive rocks (Geol.), primary rocks. See under Primary.

    Primitive sheath. (Anat.) See Neurilemma.

    Primitive streak or Primitive trace (Anat.), an opaque and thickened band where the mesoblast first appears in the vertebrate blastoderm.

    Syn: First; original; radical; pristine; ancient; primeval; antiquated; old-fashioned.

Primitive

Primitive \Prim"i*tive\, n. An original or primary word; a word not derived from another; -- opposed to derivative.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
primitive

late 14c., "of an original cause; of a thing from which something is derived; not secondary" (a sense now associated with primary), from Old French primitif "very first, original" (14c.) and directly from Latin primitivus "first or earliest of its kind," from primitus "at first," from primus "first" (see prime (adj.)).\n

\nMeaning "of or belonging to the first age" is from early 15c. Meaning "having the style of an early or ancient time" is from 1680s. In Christian sense of "adhering to the qualities of the early Church" it is recorded from 1680s. Of untrained artists from 1942. Related: Primitively.

primitive

c.1400, "original ancestor," from Latin primitivus (see primitive (adj.)). Meaning "aboriginal person in a land visited by Europeans" is from 1779, hence the sense "uncivilized person."

Wiktionary
primitive

a. 1 Of or pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first. 2 Of or pertaining to or harking back to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity. n. 1 (context linguistics English) An original or primary word; a word not derived from another, as opposed to (term: derivative). 2 A member of a primitive society. 3 A simple-minded person. 4 (context computing programming English) A data type that is built into the programming language, as opposed to more complex structures. 5 A basic geometric shape from which more complex shapes can be constructed. 6 (context mathematics English) A function whose derivative is a given function; an antiderivative.

Related phrases:
WordNet
primitive

  1. adj. belonging to an early stage of technical development; characterized by simplicity and (often) crudeness; "the crude weapons and rude agricultural implements of early man"; "primitive movies of the 1890s"; "primitive living conditions in the Appalachian mountains" [syn: crude, rude]

  2. little evolved from or characteristic of an earlier ancestral type; "archaic forms of life"; "primitive mammals"; "the okapi is a short-necked primitive cousin of the giraffe" [syn: archaic]

  3. used of preliterate or tribal or nonindustrial societies; "primitive societies"

  4. of or created by one without formal training; simple or naive in style; "primitive art such as that by Grandma Moses is often colorful and striking"

primitive

  1. n. a person who belongs to early stage of civilization [syn: primitive person]

  2. a mathematical expression from which another expression is derived

  3. a word serving as the basis for inflected or derived forms; "`pick' is the primitive from which `picket' is derived"

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Primitive (album)

Primitive is the second studio album by the metal band Soulfly released in 2000 through Roadrunner Records. Primitive has sold over 226,569 copies.

Primitive (Neil Diamond album)

Primitive is the sixteenth studio album by Neil Diamond. It was released in 1984 on Columbia Records. Its singles "Turn Around", "Sleep With Me Tonight", and "You Make Me Feel Like Christmas" reach numbers 4, 24, and 28, respectively on the Billboard Adult Contemporary singles chart, while "Turn Around" also reached number 62 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The album was certified gold by the RIAA on October 5, 1984

Primitive

Primitive may refer to:

  • Anarcho-primitivism, an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization
  • Primitive culture, one that lacks major signs of economic development or modernity
  • Noble savage, a particular stock character in literature, i.e., a person uncorrupted by the influences of civilization
  • Primitive communism, a pre-agrarian form of communism according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  • Primitive Church, another name for early Christianity
  • Restorationism, also described as Christian primitivism, is the belief that Christianity should be restored along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church.
  • Primitive Baptist, a religious movement seeking to retain or restore early Christian practices
  • Primitive Methodism
  • Primitive (phylogenetics) characteristic of an early stage of development or evolution, cf. basal
Primitive (phylogenetics)

In phylogenetics, a primitive (or ancestral) character, trait, or feature of a lineage or taxon is one that is inherited from the common ancestor of a clade (or clade group) and has undergone little change since. Conversely, a trait that appears within the clade group (that is, is present in any subgroup within the clade but not all) is called advanced or derived. A clade is a group in which all members have the same common ancestor.

A primitive trait is the original condition of that trait in the common ancestor; advanced indicates a notable change from the original condition. These terms in biology contain no judgement about the sophistication, superiority, value or adaptiveness of the named trait. "Primitive" in biology means only that the character appeared first in the common ancestor of a clade group and has been passed on largely intact to more recent members of the clade. "Advanced" means the character has evolved within a later subgroup of the clade.

Other, more technical, terms for these two conditions—for example, "plesiomorphic" and "synapomorphic"—are frequently encountered; see the table below.

Primitive (philately)

In philately, primitives, also called natives, are postage stamps that were crudely designed and printed as compared with the sophisticated productions of industrialized countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States. A number of such stamps were produced in the classic stamp period in remote or undeveloped locales such as Mauritius. Due to their charm and sometimes rarity, primitives are among the most popular stamps with stamp collectors.

Several well known primitives copied the designs of standard postage stamps of major countries. For example, the early stamps of Mauritius were crude, locally produced copies of the then current postage stamps of the United Kingdom. Similarly, the stamps of Corrientes, a province in northern Argentina, were inept imitations of earlier stamps of France, depicting the agricultural goddess Ceres. Other primitives are of their own unique design.

Other primitives include the following:

  • British Guiana "Cottonreels", 1850–51.
  • Cape of Good Hope Wood block triangle stamps of 1861.
  • India stamps of 1854.
  • Various Indian Native Feudatory State stamps.
  • Some early stamps of Mexico
  • New Caledonia Napoleon III, 1859.
Related phrases:

Usage examples of "primitive".

Why then should not this first, primitive, health-enjoying and life-sustaining class of our people be equally accommodated in all that gives to social and substantial life, its due development?

The processes of the primitive accumulation of capital imposed new conditions on all the structures of power.

When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the concept of nation was taken up in very different ideological contexts and led popular mobilizations in regions and countries within and outside Europe that had experienced neither the liberal revolution nor the same level of primitive accumulation, it still always was presented as a concept of capitalist modernization, which claimed to bring together the interclass demands for political unity and the needs of economic development.

Laud and his associates, by reviving a few primitive institutions of this nature, corrected the error of the first reformers, and presented to the affrightened and astonished mind some sensible, exterior observances, which might occupy it during its religious exercises, and abate the violence of its disappointed efforts.

In Part II we also consider the possible coexistence of primitive hominids and anatomically modern humans not only in the distant past but in the present.

They can be distinguished from the primitive archosauromorphs by the presence of an opening in the skull in front of the eye, the antorbital fenestra.

Rome were separated in their creed from the apostolical and primitive faith.

The Apostolical Succession, the two prominent sacraments, and the primitive Creeds, belonged, indeed, to the latter, but there had been and was far less strictness on matters of dogma and ritual in the Anglican system than in the Roman: in consequence, my main argument for the Anglican claims lay in the positive and special charges, which I could bring against Rome.

The thatched roofs of the more primitive type of cabins looked bedrabbled, like the hair of a bather emerging from the lake, and the more substantial shelters were crowded with the overflow from these and from tents deserted by troops and patrols that had been almost drowned out.

One was a primitive, a warrior from some small bellicose tribe from way back in the jungle.

I had hoped to soon set sail for Normandy, there to spend some time in my own lands and get the taste of this benighted land from off my tongue, its squalorous stinks from out my nostrils, not to set sail across thousands of leagues of open ocean to fetch up, at last, in a place even more primitive and dark and bloody than this Ireland.

They had it all to themselves, and it was filled with things that Bernard liked--inequalities of level, with mossy steps connecting them, rose-trees trained upon old brick walls, horizontal trellises arranged like Italian pergolas, and here and there a towering poplar, looking as if it had survived from some more primitive stage of culture, with its stiff boughs motionless and its leaves forever trembling.

Ginkgo, a primitive, weird, spindly tree, here about four feet high, with a bilobed, fan-shaped leaf unlike any other.

In the universe that Brewster came from, alchemists were wizards of a sort who played with rather primitive chemistry sets and sought the secret of changing base metals into gold.

But Britt knows that slow, deep breaths will bring in the oxygen needed to metabolize away the residue of adrenaline and free his body from the influence of this powerful, primitive hormone that was instinctively released by his brain in the face of the death out there on the track.