priority

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English[edit]

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Etymology[edit]

From Old French priorite, from Latin prioritas.

Morphologically prior +‎ -ity

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

priority (countable and uncountable, plural priorities)

  1. An item's relative importance.
    He set his e-mail message's priority to high.
  2. A goal of a person or an organisation.
    She needs to get her priorities straight and stop playing games.
  3. The quality of being earlier or coming first compared to another thing; the state of being prior.
    In bankruptcy law, a business' debt to its employees has priority over its debt to a landlord, so the employees must be paid first.
    • 2020 January 2, Graeme Pickering, “Fuelling the changes on Teesside rails”, in Rail, page 59:
      But it's now platform extension work which will allow the station to handle LNER Azuma trains which needs to take priority, if a direct service to London King's Cross is to begin in 2021.
  4. (taxonomy, of a name) A superior claim to use by virtue of being validly published at an earlier date.
    • 1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page viii:
      Neither [Jones] […] nor I (in 1966) could conceive of reducing our "science" to the ultimate absurdity of reading Finnish newspapers almost a century and a half old in order to establish "priority."
  5. (obsolete) Precedence; superior rank.
  6. (transport) right of way; The right to pass (an intersection) before other road users

Synonyms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

attributive use — see prioritized
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