tertiary

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. adj. Third in place, order, degree, or rank.
2. adj. Of, relating to, or designating the short flight feathers nearest the body on the rear edge of a bird's wing.
3. adj. Chemistry Of or relating to salts of acids containing three replaceable hydrogen atoms.
4. adj. Chemistry Of or relating to organic compounds in which a group, such as an alcohol or amine, is bound to three nonelementary radicals.
5. adj. Of or belonging to the geologic time, system of rocks, or sedimentary deposits of the first period of the Cenozoic Era, characterized by the appearance of modern flora and of apes and other large mammals. See Table at geologic time.
6. n. A tertiary feather.
7. n. The Tertiary Period or its system of deposits.
8. n. Roman Catholic Church A member of a religious Third Order.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. Of the third order, rank, or formation; third.
2. In geology, of, pertaining to, or occurring in the Tertiary. See II. .
3. In ornithology, same as tertial: distinguished from secondary and from primary. See cuts under bird and covert, n., 6.
4. Belonging or pertaining To the Tertiaries. See II. .
5. n. One who or that which is tertiary, or third in order or succession. Specifically— [capitalized] In geology, that part of the series of geological formations which lies above the Mesozoic or Secondary and below the Quaternary; the “Cænozoic” of some authors, while others include in this division both Tertiary and Quaternary. The term Tertiary belongs to au early-period in the history of geology, the entire series having been divided into Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The term transition was afterward introduced (see transition), and Quaternary still later; but the Quaternary has been considered by some as being rather a subdivision of the Tertiary, since it seems to have been of relatively short duration, and not anywhere preceded by any break to be compared in importance with that which in various regions characterizes the passage from Mesozoic to Tertiary. The Tertiary was divided by Lyell into three groups or systems, the basis of this classification being the percentage of living species of Mollusca in each group; these divisions were designated by him as the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, to which a fourth was added later by Beyrich, namely the Oligocene, intercalated between the Eocene and Miocene. This scheme of subdivision is still accepted as convenient and philosophical, although strict regard is not paid to the precise percentages of living species indicated by Lyell. The subdivisions of these larger divisions which have been found necessary in different regions vary considerably in number and character. The break between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary in northwestern Europe is, on the whole, very marked in character; in various other parts of the world it is much less apparent. The more important and striking features of the Tertiary may be very concisely summed up as follows: evidence of the greatly increasing importance of the surface of the land as compared with that of the water, as shown by the local and detrital character, and the small and rapidly varying thickness, of the deposits, together with the rapidly increasing development of a land-fauna and -flora; the uplifting of the great mountain-chains of the globe, an operation performed on a gigantic scale, some parts of the early Tertiary having been raised to an elevation of nearly 20,000 feet above the sea-level; the almost entire disappearance of many of those forms of animal life which were prominent during the Mesozoic epoch, as of the cephalopods, the gigantic reptiles, and especially the development of the Mammalia in ever-increasing numbers and diversity of type; the very much diminished importance both as respects numbers and size of many of those forms of vegetable life which were most prominent in pre-Tertiary times, such as the ferns, the lycopods, and the cycads, and the development of modern forest vegetation, in which the dicotyledonous angio-sperms play a very important part; the zonal distribution of life and climate; the evidence, furnished in abundance in various parts of the world, of a marked diminution in temperature going on through Tertiary times, the proof of which, if begun before the Tertiary, could only be obtained with great difficulty, if at all, owing to the small relative importance of the land-areas; and, finally, the appearance of man upon the earth, an event which took place, so far as is known from present available evidence, some time before the close of the Pliocene. See also Posttertiary, Quaternary, and recent, 4.
6. n. A color, as russet, citrine, or olive, produced by the mixture of two secondary colors. Tertiaries are grays, and are either red-gray, blue-gray, or yellow-gray when these primaries are in excess, or violet-gray, orange-gray, or green-gray when these secondaries are in excess.
7. n. Same as tertial.

Wiktionary

1. adj. Of third rank or order; subsequent.
2. n. A tertiary feather.
3. n. A member of a Roman Catholic third order - the Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites among others.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. Being of the third formation, order, or rank; third.
2. adj. (Chem.) Possessing some quality in the third degree; having been subjected to the substitution of three atoms or radicals. Cf. Primary, and Secondary.
3. adj. (Geol.) Later than, or subsequent to, the Secondary.
4. adj. (Zoöl.) Growing on the innermost joint of a bird's wing; tertial; -- said of quills.
5. n. (R. C. Ch.) A member of the Third Order in any monastic system. See Third Order, under third.
6. n. (Geol.) The Tertiary era, period, or formation.
7. n. (Zoöl.) One of the quill feathers which are borne upon the basal joint of the wing of a bird. See Illust. of Bird.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. from 63 million to 2 million years ago
2. adj. coming next after the second and just before the fourth in position