primeval

• primaeval, primæval

From Latin primaevus (“in the first or earliest period of life”) +‎ -al, from primus (“first”) + aevum (“time, age”); see prime and age.

• enPR: "prīm'ēvəl, IPA^(key): /ˌpɹaɪˈmi.vəl/

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primeval (comparative more primeval, superlative most primeval)

1. Belonging to the first ages.
   • 1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 130:

     And Tarzan had to be contented with that arrangement, though he would have liked it well enough to have set off the next morning—he was as impatient as a child. Really Tarzan of the Apes was but a child, or a primeval man, which is the same thing in a way.

2. Primary; original.
   • 1827 July, “Asiatic Society of Calcutta”, in The Oriental Herald, and Journal of General Literature, volume XIV, number 43, London: Printed for the editor, and sold by all booksellers [printed by J. R. Gordon, 147, Strand], →OCLC, page 147:

     A letter from Mr. [Brian Houghton] Hodgson to Mr. Bayley, was then read, giving an outline of the theocracy of the Buddha system of Nepal. […] According to the information now communicated, the northern Buddhas acknowledge four sets of divine beings, or of superhuman objects of veneration. The first of these is, contrary to the generally supposed atheistical tendency of the faith, one primæval and uncreated deity. This first Buddha manifested five of his attributes, as five secondary Buddhas; in one of whom, Amitabha, or the 'immeasurably splendid,' in Prakrit and Pali, Amitabo, we recognise the Amito of the Japanese.

   • 1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter VI, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 116:

     But if life has a happiness over which the primeval curse has passed and harmed not, it is the early and long enduring affection of blood and habit.

3. Primitive.
   • 1957, H. E. Bates, Death of a Huntsman:

     If their views were entrancing their sanitation was primeval; if they possessed stables they were also next to the gas-works; if their gardens were delightful there were odours suspicious of mice in the bedrooms.

• “primeval”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “primeval”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.