earliest

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

A new study suggests that the earliest animals on Earth may have unintentionally slowed the rise of biodiversity.

From Science Daily • Jun. 10, 2026

Working off that timeline, the earliest that OpenAI and Anthropic would debut is August.

From Barron's • Jun. 9, 2026

My earliest memories of the one-pot dish are of rainy days spent either lounging on the couch or under the sheets.

From Salon • Jun. 7, 2026

Within hours of carrying the first telegram across the English Channel in 1850, the earliest “submarine telegraph”—27 miles of copper wire wrapped in a rubbery substance called gutta percha—was broken by a fishing trawler.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 4, 2026

Pythagoras, the Greek scholar—half scientist, half mystic—who lived in Croton around 530 BC, proposed one of the earliest and most widely accepted theories to explain the similarity between parents and their children.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee