first vs primary

first

adj
  • Preceding all others of a series or kind; the ordinal of one; earliest. 

  • Of or belonging to a first family. 

  • Most eminent or exalted; most excellent; chief; highest. 

adv
  • For the first time. 

  • Before anything else; firstly. 

  • Now. 

noun
  • first base 

  • A first-edition copy of some publication. 

  • A fraction whose (integer) denominator ends in the digit 1. 

  • The first gear of an engine. 

  • Something that has never happened before; a new occurrence. 

  • A first-class honours degree. 

  • The person or thing in the first position. 

primary

adj
  • first or earliest in a group or series. 

  • Earliest formed; fundamental. 

  • main; principal; chief; placed ahead of others. 

  • Relating to day-to-day care provided by health professionals such as nurses, general practitioners, dentists etc. 

  • Relating to the place where a disorder or disease started to occur. 

  • Illustrating, possessing, or characterized by, some quality or property in the first degree; having undergone the first stage of substitution or replacement. 

verb
  • To challenge (an incumbent sitting politician) for their political party's nomination to run for re-election, through running a challenger campaign in a primary election, especially one that is more ideologically extreme. 

  • To take part in a primary election. 

noun
  • A directly driven inductive coil, as in a transformer or induction motor that is magnetically coupled to a secondary 

  • A primary school. 

  • A primary election; a preliminary election to select a political candidate of a political party. 

  • A radar return from an aircraft (or other object) produced solely by the reflection of the radar beam from the aircraft's skin, without additional information from the aircraft's transponder. 

  • Any flight feather attached to the manus (hand) of a bird. 

  • A base or fundamental component; something that is irreducible. 

  • The most massive component of a gravitationally bound system, such as a planet in relation to its satellites. 

  • The first year of grade school. 

  • A primary colour. 

  • Primary site of disease; original location or source of the disease. 

  • The first stage of a thermonuclear weapon, which sets off a fission explosion to help trigger a fusion reaction in the weapon's secondary stage. 

How often have the words first and primary occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )