pre-Adamite

American  

[pree-ad-uh-mahyt] / priˈæd əˌmaɪt /

noun

1. a person supposed to have existed before Adam.

2. a person who believes that there were people in existence before Adam.

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adjective

1. Also pre-Adamic existing before Adam.

2. of or relating to the pre-Adamites.

Etymology

Origin of pre-Adamite

First recorded in 1655–65; pre- + Adam + -ite ¹

Example Sentences

As the dives are become subject to thy beck, I expected to have found thee on the throne of the pre-Adamite kings.”

From Shorter Novels, Eighteenth Century The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story; Vathek, an Arabian Tale by Beckford, William

Alas, he that speaks must use English, French, or some language which is partly conventional; and that pre-Adamite or Saturnian vernacular in which we are all trying to speak has no verbal sign.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 by Various

Further in the distance, through a dim exhalation, across the mists of eternities, I beheld vaguely the seventy-two pre-Adamite kings, with their seventy-two peoples, vanished forever.

From Humorous Ghost Stories by Scarborough, Dorothy

No discoveries, then, which geologists may make of pre-Adamite races of men, can at all affect the credit of Moses' account of the creation of Adam, and of the history of his family.

From Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity by Patterson, Robert

In the same way we look with a pleasing kind of pity on the quandaries of those whom we shall call—with no belief whatever in the pre-Adamite theory—the pre-Macadamites.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 331, May, 1843 by Various