First means nothing comes before it. The first day of school, the first name on the register, the first bus of the morning at ten past five.
First does three jobs at once. Adjective: the first time. Adverb: wash your hands first, or he came first in the race. Noun: a first for the club, meaning something that has never happened before. Watch the small phrases, because they pull apart — at first means in the beginning and hints that things changed later, first of all simply opens a list, and first thing means early in the morning. Your first name is your given name. And in Britain the first floor is the one above the ground floor, while in America it is the ground floor itself, which has stranded a lot of people in lifts.
1adjectivefirstComing before everyone and everything else.~74%
“This is the first house we have looked at.”
synonyms: earliest, initial
2adverbanythingBefore doing anything else.~24%
“Read the whole form first, then sign it.”
3nounhappenedSomething that has never happened before.~2%
“A woman leading the club is a first.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 25 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
First is a superlative, formed the way biggest is. Old English fyrest came from Proto-Germanic *furistaz, 'foremost', built on *furi, 'before' — so first means most-before: fore with -est stuck on the end. The same word gave German Fürst, a prince, who was the first-born.
Proto-Indo-European
*preh₂-
Proto-Germanic
*furistaz — first, foremost
Proto-West Germanic
*furist
Old English
fyrest
Middle English
first
English, today
first
Built from
From Middle English first, furst, ferst, fyrst, from Old English fyrest, from Proto-West Germanic furist, from Proto-Germanic furistaz (“first, foremost”), superlative of Proto-Germanic furai, furi (“before”), from Proto-Indo-European preh₂- (“before”), from per- (“before; first”), equivalent to fore + est. 2 Cognate with Scots first (“first”), Dutch voorste (“foremost, first”), vorst (“prince”), German Fürst (“chief, prince”) literally “first (born)”, li Vürsch (“prince”), lb viischt (“anterior; forward”), wym fiyśt, fjəšt, fjyśt, fjyšt (“prince”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål først (“first”), Faroese and Icelandic fyrstur (“first”), Norwegian Nynorsk fyrst, først (“first”), Swedish först (“first”); also Latin prīnceps (“first, foremost; chief”), Greek παρ', παρά (“despite; less”), gmy 𐀞𐀫 (“from”), Albanian parë (“first; chief, main”), ltg pyrmais (“first”), Latvian pirmais (“first; foremost”), Lithuanian pirmas (“first; primary”), Bulgarian пъ́рви, пръ́в (“first”), Czech and Slovak prvý (“first”), mk прв, први (“first”), Polish piersy, pierwszy, pirszy (“first”), Russian пе́рвый (“first”), Serbo-Croatian пр̑вӣ, pȓvī (“first”), Slovene prvi (“first”), Armenian հարավ (“south”), ae 𐬞𐬀𐬎𐬭𐬎𐬎𐬀 (“before, first”), xto pärwat (“first”), txb parwe (“first”), Sanskrit पूर्व (“before”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA