priority
Pluralpriorities
- 1The relative importance of something compared with other things.
The committee assigned each request a priority based on its urgency.
Cost and speed both matter, but for this project quality takes priority.
Similarprecedence, importance, rank, weight
- 2A goal that a person or an organization aims to achieve.
The company's top priority for the year is expanding overseas.
Reducing waste became a key priority for the whole team.
Similargoal, aim, objective, concern, focus
Note
The plural is where this sense lives. A person's priorities are the goals they rank above everything else, and to get your priorities straight is to put them back in a sensible order. The sense of relative importance measures a thing. This one names the goal itself, so it counts easily: a top priority, a key priority, too many priorities.
- 3Precedence over others; superior rank or standing.
Senior staff take priority when choosing their vacation dates.
Creditors with secured loans have priority over other claimants.
Similarprecedence, preference
Note
Here what comes first is a person or a power, judged by standing rather than by time. Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1608) has "Right worthy you priority," granting a leader the right to go ahead. Later writers use the word to settle who outranks whom: bishops or emperors, a mother or a wife. The usual pattern is has priority over. In the "coming first" meaning, sequence decides; here, rank does.
- 4The quality of being earlier than, or coming before, another thing in time.
Scientists argued about the priority of the two competing discoveries.
The dated manuscript settled the question of priority between the rivals.
Similarprecedence
Note
The word's own construction shows here most clearly: prior plus -ity, through Old French priorite from Latin prioritas, so it is literally the state of being prior. What comes first is a matter of order, such as which debt is paid before which or which piece of work must be finished before another can begin. It usually takes over: one claim has priority over another.
- 5On the road, the right to go through an intersection ahead of other traffic.
Vehicles already on the roundabout have priority over those entering it.
At an unmarked crossroads, drivers must decide who has priority.
Similarprecedence
Note
Road traffic uses the word as a plain equivalent of right of way. The road user who has priority may pass through an intersection first, and the others wait. It is a status the road situation gives, not a standing the driver holds, which separates it from precedence in rank. A driver has priority; a general or a bishop has precedence.
- 6A superior claim to use a name, based on its having been validly published at an earlier date.
The 1843 description gives the earlier name priority over its later synonym.
Taxonomists abandoned the newer name once its rival's priority was established.
Similarprecedence
Note
Taxonomy settles a naming dispute by asking which name came first. When one organism has carried two names, the one validly published earlier wins, and the later becomes a synonym. The search can reach strangely far back: Rudolf M. Schuster, in The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America (1992), balked at reading Finnish newspapers nearly a century and a half old just to establish priority. The word applies to names, not to the organisms themselves.
Practice
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Origin
This word came from Old French "priorite", which came from Latin "priōritās". It can be broken down as "prior" plus the suffix "-ity".