priority

Plural

priorities

1. 1.An item's relative importance.

   • He set his e-mail message's priority to high.

2. 2.A goal of a person or an organisation.

   • She needs to get her priorities straight and stop playing games.

3. 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.
   • 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. 4.A superior claim to use by virtue of being validly published at an earlier date.

   • 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."

Overall

Uncommon· #2243

By learning goal

Everyday conversation

Rare

General reading & writing

Uncommon

Academic

Rare

Literature

Rare

Word family

• prior