preterrestrial
preterrestrial adjective: prior to the formation of Earth.
Adjective
preterrestrial (not comparable)
- Prior to the formation of Earth
- The System of the World of Laplace is the history of a preterrestrial era, the history of the world before the formation of the planet Earth, or if one prefers, of the Earth in its unity with the Sun.1980, Eugenio Donato, “The Museum's Furnace”, in Textual Strategies, →ISBN, page 235
- Occurring prior to a meteorite's impact with Earth
- A plagioclase glass in some chondrites and irons formed by preterrestrial impact between meteorites in space.2003, American Geological Institute, Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms, →ISBN, page 333
Origin of preterrestrial
From pre- + terrestrial.
Words formed from preterrestrial
- preterrestrially
Questions about preterrestrial
- What does preterrestrial mean?
- Preterrestrial means prior to the formation of Earth.
- What part of speech is preterrestrial?
- Preterrestrial is an adjective.
Words near preterrestrial in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: preterrestrial (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “preterrestrial.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/preterrestrial. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.