adjective

• 1More important than any other considerations.

  ‘the overriding concern of the organizers was the financial crisis’

  More example sentences

  • ‘But in this case, a number of overriding political considerations made this unviable.’
  • ‘The overriding concern of the main parties was the seeming lack of any interest in an election by the public.’
  • ‘A satisfactory and lasting result in the water context cannot be achieved and should not be attempted by wholly divorcing consideration of the overriding conflict.’
  • ‘Since the reform and opening up policy was adopted in the early 1980s, the Chinese Government has always firmly put stability as a principle of overriding importance.’
  • ‘It is through necessity rather than choice that we have taken this action and patient safety has to be the overriding consideration.’
  • ‘In the end, however, there was an overriding consideration.’
  • ‘It also says the traffic would be unwelcome and that no consideration of the overriding need for the mineral has been demonstrated.’
  • ‘In the case of this legislation, the welfare of our children has to be the overriding consideration.’
  • ‘Subject to this overriding consideration, the umpire at the bowler's end should stand where he does not interfere with either the bowler's run up or the striker's view.’
  • ‘That will require action to meet the practical concerns of states that still regard the nonintervention principle as of overriding importance to their national well-being.’
  • ‘Here the placing of some particular pawn or piece may be of overriding significance while general considerations recede into the background.’
  • ‘Time and time again, when we are looking at sentences and looking at parole, the overriding consideration seems to be whether the offender, if let out, will pose a risk.’
  • ‘Of course, these cannot be allowed to become the overriding considerations but the concepts of fairness between classes of beneficiaries does not require them to be excluded.’
  • ‘They will instead be referred to a brigade-level review, where the overriding consideration will be keeping them on the Army's books.’
  • ‘As I have said, the overriding consideration under Part IV is the fulfilment of the child's special educational needs.’
  • ‘The overriding considerations are in my judgment these.’
  • ‘Yet he is being criticized, even threatened by his superiors for refusing to make financial considerations the overriding factor.’
  • ‘With safety as the overriding consideration, should the court remove a child from its home, or return a child to its family?’
  • ‘I accept that in this emergency, national defense must be our overriding concern.’
  • ‘In this conception of politics, the ruler's overriding concern was with justice and the encouragement of virtue throughout the city, for it was on virtue that peace and good order ultimately depended.’

  Synonyms

  most important, of greatest importance, of prime importance, of supreme importance, of greatest significance, uppermost, top, supreme, first, first and foremost, highest, pre-eminent, outstanding, predominant, dominant, prevailing, preponderant, principal, leading, primary, paramount, chief, main, major, most prominent, cardinal, foremost, central, key, focal, pivotal, essential

  View synonyms
• 2 technical Extending or moving over something, especially while remaining in close contact.

  ‘oceanic lithosphere beneath an overriding continental plate’

  More example sentences

  • ‘If the overriding plate is continental, the volcanic arc expresses itself as an extended mountain range such as the Andes of South America.’
  • ‘The buoyancy force was calculated from the potential energy difference between the overriding continental plate and the subducting oceanic plate.’
  • ‘Secondly, the geometry of rigid crust that makes up the overriding plate, will have a big impact on how stress is transmitted into the sediments that are caught up in the subduction zone.’
  • ‘It has further been shown that the propagating distance of the deformation front depends on the brittle integrated strength and buoyancy force of the overriding plate, as well as the amount of migration of the trench.’
  • ‘When convergence rate and subduction rate differ, the trench migrates with respect to a fixed point in the overriding plate interior.’