Definition of "in the first place" []

• To begin with; earlier; first; at the start. (adverb)

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• "The women who stage Ann Summers parties have to supplement their case of products – which they have to rent in the first place – from their own pockets, if they want to make sales."
• "Yet if he remembered correctly the principles of gravitational-vector gunnery—and he did, though where and how he had learned them in the first place eluded him—he could easily top Joshua's simple trajectory acrobatics."
• "The Bluemback fivefold division of mankind considers the negro in the first place under Ethiopian, embracing the Kafir, Hottentot,"