preprimitive en · ADJ
Etymology
From pre- + primitive.
Meanings
-
(not-comparable) Before a primitive age.
The Stony Hill Cemetery, lying beyond the “heavily wooded areas of maple oak,” remains in an essentially preprimitive state.
2009, Ana Lucia Araujo, Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery, page 73:[…]John Smith remarked them as he coasted by / Dangling their legs and fishing off a wharf / At the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself They weren't Red Indians but veritable Pre-primitives of the white race, dawn people, Like those who furnished Adam's sons with wives; […]
2019 October 8, Robert Frost, A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost (Leather-bound Classics), Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, →LCCN:
- (not-comparable) Of a variety: not itself primitive, but whose proper subvarieties are all primitive.