Existing since the very beginning — before almost everything else.
📰 Seen in the news
Scientists found water-rich material that may be older than the Sun locked inside a rare meteorite — evidence that some of Earth's water may have arrived from the freezing outer Solar System. The finding, published 16 Sep 2026, has scientists "truly astonished" — it rewrites how our planet got its oceans.
Primordial = older than everything else in the room
From Latin primus (first) + ordiri (to begin) — the stuff that was there before things started getting arranged. Primordial soup, primordial seas, and now possibly primordial water riding inside meteorites. In science, calling something primordial is the highest possible compliment for its age: it survived everything that erased everything else.
Keep it: Primordial = 'first-est'. Your grandparents' attic is old; primordial dust is 4.6 billion years old.
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