primaries

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of primary.

   Candidates spent months campaigning before the primaries.

   An injured bird had lost several of its primaries and could not fly.

   Note

   Several unrelated nouns share this plural. In politics it names nominating elections. To an ornithologist it means the flight feathers on a bird's hand. In astronomy, primaries are the massive bodies that satellites orbit. Elsewhere it can mean primary schools or irreducible components. The form never tells them apart, so the surrounding words must do it: campaigning before the primaries, a bird missing its primaries.

2. 2
   verbUS

   Third-person singular simple present of primary.

   Whenever an incumbent drifts from the party line, this faction primaries him.

   The advocacy organization primaries representatives who weaken environmental rules.

   Note

   A verb of US party politics that works with or without an object. Transitively, a faction primaries an incumbent by running a challenger for the party's nomination, often a more ideologically extreme one. Intransitively, a candidate simply competes in a primary. A determiner usually separates it from the plural noun: "the primaries" is the noun, while "she primaries" is the verb.

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