Word.ws English Dictionary

first thing

first thing adverb: early in the morning.

Adverb

first thing (not comparable)

  1. Early in the morning.
    • I'll meet you first thing at the station.
  2. Straight away, very soon.
    • Some of 'em said that when a boy had been away from home a couple of years he ought to want to see his folks the first thing.1916 March 11, Charles E. Van Loan, “His Folks”, in Saturday Evening Post
    • I'll do it first thing after school tomorrow.2009, Alex J. Packer, Bringing Up Parents: The Teenager's Handbook, →ISBN

Noun

first thing (plural first things)

  1. The basic idea of how to do something.
    • I would help you, but I don't know the first thing about gardening.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see first, thing.
    • I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big...1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

Examples of first thing in a sentence

  • You had to see it first thing, 'cause it was the first thing that caught the eye.2012, Cd Harper, And Face the Unknown: The Journey of a Lincoln-freed Colored, →ISBN:
  • So, to borrow a phrase from Nike, just do it—and do it first thing.2013, Nelson Searcy, Jennifer Dykes Henson, The Renegade Pastor: Abandoning Average in Your Life and Ministry, →ISBN, page 2013:
  • It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:

Forms of first thing

pluralfirst things

Questions about first thing

What does first thing mean?
First thing means early in the morning.
How do you use first thing in a sentence?
You had to see it first thing, 'cause it was the first thing that caught the eye.
What part of speech is first thing?
First thing can be an adverb or a noun.

Words near first thing in the dictionary

  1. first strikes
  2. first string
  3. first success distribution
  4. first team
  5. first teams
  6. first thing
  7. first thing's first
  8. first things
  9. first things first
  10. first time
  11. first timed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: first thing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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