Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One of mankind; one of the human race considered as descended from Adam.
  • noun One of that section of mankind more particularly regarded as the offspring of Adam, in contradistinction to a supposed older race, called Preadamites.
  • noun One of a sect which originated in the north of Africa in the second century, and pretended to have attained to the primitive innocence of Adam.
  • noun A mineral occurring in small yellow or green crystals and in mammillary groups; a hydrous arseniate of zinc, isomorphous with olivenite: found in Chili, and also at Laurium in Greece. Also called adamine.

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

  • noun A descendant of Adam; a human being.
  • noun (Eccl. Hist.) One of a sect of visionaries, who, professing to imitate the state of Adam, discarded the use of dress in their assemblies.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A descendant of Adam; a human being.
  • noun mineralogy A zinc arsenate hydroxide mineral, Zn2AsO4OH.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • When in operation, the sphere is protonically charged, and the truncated cone of adamite collects the electrons, taking them from their regular orbits and redirecting them in a continuous stream against whichever portion of the sphere it is pointed at.

    "The Golden Girl of Munan" by Harl Vincent, part 3 Johnny Pez 2009

  • Bloody old pre-adamite with his twohandled umberella!

    Finnegans Wake 2006

  • Your lovely little person in my estimation is far more precious than all the treasures of the pre-adamite Sultans, and I wish to possess it at pleasure, and in open day, for many a moon, before I go to burrow underground like a mole.

    The History of the Caliph Vathek 2004

  • Of all the pre-adamite whale yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton.

    Moby Dick; or the Whale 2002

  • But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin.

    Moby Dick; or the Whale 2002

  • In the same extinct sea is found the skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, a marine lizard of equal size, and warm-blooded, whose swan-like neck and body graced the serene seas of the pre-adamite world.

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873 Various

  • The wind had done in that northern latitude what has been performed by some violent pre-adamite agency in the Berber desert.

    Russia As Seen and Described by Famous Writers Various

  • With rocket-motors of adamite -- the stuff discovered by pure accident in a steel-mill back on Earth -- the propelling apparatus checked out.

    Operation: Outer Space Murray Leinster 1935

  • As I don't, I merely smile again, and say "Yes" to Jenkyns Soames, who is giving me his reasons for supposing, by calculation, that vegetables have had a pre-adamite existence, and that even a turnip may have a glorious future before it, when man has disappeared from the face of the earth.

    Happy-Thought Hall 1876

  • In the eighteenth century I would have stood up for Scheuchzer's pre-adamite man against Peter

    A Journey to the Interior of the Earth Jules Verne 1866

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