primitive

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• adjective Of or relating to an early or original stage or state; primeval.
• adjective Occurring in or characteristic of an early stage of development or evolution.
• adjective Having developed early in the evolutionary history of a group.
• adjective Regarded as having changed little in evolutionary history. Not in scientific use.
• adjective Characterized by simplicity or crudity; unsophisticated.
• adjective Of or relating to a nonindustrial, often tribal culture, especially one that is characterized by an absence of literacy and a low level of economic or technological complexity.
• adjective Not derived from something else; primary or basic.
• adjective Serving as the basis for derived or inflected forms.
• adjective Being a protolanguage.
• adjective Not resulting from conscious thought or deliberation; unconscious or instinctual.
• adjective Of or created by an artist without formal training; simple or naive in style.
• adjective Of or relating to late medieval or pre-Renaissance European painters or sculptors.
• noun A person belonging to a nonindustrial, often tribal society, especially a society characterized by a low level of economic or technological complexity.
• noun Derogatory An unsophisticated or unintelligent person.
• noun One that is at a low or early stage of development.
• noun One belonging to an early stage in the development of an artistic trend, especially a painter of the pre-Renaissance period.
• noun An artist having or affecting a simple, direct, unschooled style, as of painting.
• noun A work of art created by a primitive artist.
• noun A word or word element from which another word is derived by morphological or historical processes or from which inflected forms are derived.
• noun A basic and indivisible unit of linguistic analysis.
• noun Mathematics An algebraic or geometric expression from which another expression is derived.
• noun Computers A basic or fundamental unit of machine instruction or translation.

from The Century Dictionary.

• In the history of art, belonging to an early and not fully developed period.
• In group-theory, not imprimitive.
• noun [capitalized] In the fine arts, a craftsman or artist who belongs to an early or under-developed period; especially, in the history of European painting, those painters of Italy, Flanders, Germany, and France who flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at the close of the medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance. See painting, 1.
• noun A work of art produced by one of the primitives.
• Pertaining to the beginning or origin; original; especially, having something else of the same kind derived from it, but not itself derived from anything of the same kind; first: as, the primitive church; the primitive speech.
• Characterized by the simplicity of old times; old-fashioned; plain or rude: as, a primitive style of dress.
• In grammar, noting a word as related to another that is derived from it; noting that word from which a derivative is made, whether itself demonstrably derivative or not.
• In biology: rudimentary; inceptive; primordial; beginning to take form or acquire recognizable existence: applicable to any part, organ, or structure in the first or a very early stage of its formation: as, the primitive cerebral vesicles (the rudiment of the brain, out of which the whole brain is to be formed). See cut at protovertebra.
• Primary or first of its kind; temporary and soon to disappear: opposed to definitive: as, the primitive aorta.
• In botany, noting specific types, in opposition to forms resulting from hybridization.
• In geology, of the earliest or supposed earliest formation: in the early history of geology noting the older crystalline rocks of which the age and stratigraphical relations were uncertain, and the fossils (where these had once been present) either entirely obliterated or rendered so indistinct by metamorphism of the strata in which they were embedded that their determination was a matter of doubt.
• a number whose pth power diminished by unity is the lowest power of it divisible by p.
• a number which satisfies the congruence x l (mod p) and no similar congruence of lower degree.
• Synonyms and Pristine, etc. See primary.
• noun An original or primary word; a word from which another is derived: opposed to derivative.
• noun An early Christian.
• noun In mathematics, a geometrical or algebraic form from which another is derived, especially an algebraic expression of which another is the derivative; an equation which satisfies a differential equation, or equation of differences, of which it is said to be the primitive (if it has the requisite number of arbitrary constants to form the solution of the differential equation, it is called the complete primitive: see complete); a curve of which another is the polar or reciprocal, etc.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun An original or primary word; a word not derived from another; -- opposed to derivative.
• adjective Of or pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first
• adjective Of or pertaining to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity.
• adjective Original; primary; radical; not derived.
• adjective (Geom.) that system of axes to which the points of a magnitude are first referred, with reference to a second set or system, to which they are afterward referred.
• adjective (Mus.) that chord, the lowest note of which is of the same literal denomination as the fundamental base of the harmony; -- opposed to derivative.