PRIMEVAL

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does primeval mean? 

• PRIMEVAL (adjective)
  The adjective PRIMEVAL has 1 sense:

1. having existed from the beginning; in an earliest or original stage or state

  Familiarity information: PRIMEVAL used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PRIMEVAL (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having existed from the beginning; in an earliest or original stage or state

Synonyms:

aboriginal; primaeval; primal; primeval; primordial

Context example:

primordial forms of life

Similar:

early (at or near the beginning of a period of time or course of events or before the usual or expected time)

 Context examples 

I could testify that it was full of strange creatures, and I had seen several land forms of primeval life which we had not before encountered.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

He was the Wild—the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and betrayed.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

So they stood in a quiver of eagerness and expectation, whilst that huge multitude hung so silently and breathlessly upon every motion that they might have believed themselves to be alone, man to man, in the centre of some primeval solitude.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The woods on either side were primeval, which are more easily penetrated than woods of the second growth, and we had no great difficulty in carrying our canoes through them.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was a rude, raw, primeval version of the Jews in Babylon or the Israelites in Egypt.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was not until the night had fallen, and the fires of our savage allies glowed red in the shadows, that our two men of science could be dragged away from the fascinations of that primeval lake.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)