A. (as two words).
The first of a scries of classes in which things or persons are grouped. Usually implying priority in importance; esp. in fixed or technical applications, e.g., the highest grade of accommodation for travellers by railway or steamboat, the highest division in an examination-list.
1807. [see CLASS sb. 4].
1846. Commercial Mag., Oct., 135. There is a first-class for those who are willing to pay for the superior comfort.
b. ellipt. A place in the first class of an examination list (cf. CLASS sb. 4.); one who has obtained such a place.
1838. British Mag., VI. 100. There was no double First-Class [Referring to Oxford].
1859. Farrar, J. Home, 186. My father has made it conditional on my getting a first class in the May examination.
1885. Oxford Univ. Cal., 40. Candidates must have obtained … a First Class in Litt. Gr. et Lat. at the First Public Examination.
B. attrib. or adj. (written with the hyphen).
(In attributive use sometimes with stress on the first syll.; in predicative use the stress is equal or on the last.)
1. Of or belonging to the first class in a recognized series of grades: as, a first-class (railway) carriage, a first-class man (in an examination: also written first-classman).
1846. Commercial Mag., Oct., 133. His Lordship … refused to travel in the first-class carriages, and went as a second-class passenger.
1852. Ann. Reg., 207/2. Another collision thus took place, and although the carriage in question, a ‘composite’ carriage, the centre being a first-class compartment, was frightfully crushed, the two passengers who were in it escaped through the window without any injury.
1860. All Year Round, No. 74, 22 Sept., 560/2. At all his attempts to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood—for which his uncles did their best to ‘cram’ him—he was what flippant Cantabs call ‘plucked,’ although the classical attainments then required were not those of an Oxford first-class man.
1869. Dunkin, Midn. Sky, 14. A portion of Auriga occupies the upper part of the map west of the zenith; its position is marked by the first-class star Capella.
1871. Smiles, Charac., ii. (1876), 33. The knowledge which a child accumulates, and the ideas generated in his mind, in this period, are so important, that if we could imagine them to be afterwards obliterated, all the learning of a senior wrangler at Cambridge, or a first-classman at Oxford, would be as nothing to it, and would literally not enable its object to prolong his existence for a week.
1887. Spectator, 25 June, 860/1. Walrond was a Balliol Scholar, a first-classman, and one of the best oars in the College boat when that boat was certainly one of the two best on the river.
b. In U.S. sometimes used of the lowest or least important grade: as, a first-class clerk (= one who receives the lowest salary).
2. gen. Of the highest grade in importance, value, or excellence; of the first or best quality.
1858. R. S. Surtees, ‘Ask Mamma,’ xlv. 199. He had to put up with an inferior article,—take first-class servants who had fallen into second-class circumstances.
1872. Raymond, Statist. Mines & Mining, 147. The first-class ores were shipped to Reno and San Francisco.
1880. McCarthy, Own Times, II. xxviii. 351. Only one first-class reputation of a military order had come out of the war, and that was by the common consent of the world awarded to a Russian—to General Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol.
1885. Leeds Mercury, 24 June, 4/4. Unless some foreign question of first-class importance should arise.
b. colloq. Extremely good, ‘first-rate.’
1879. Spurgeon, Serm., XXV. 90. When he was on the road to Damascus to hunt the saints, he was on first-class terms with himself, and thought that he was doing God service.
3. quasi-adv. a. By first-class conveyance, etc. b. colloq. Excellently, very well indeed (cf. first-rate).
1895. Michael Maher, Holywell in 1894, in The Month, LXXXIII. Feb., 167. I have seen her this week, and she looks first-class and healthy, thank God.
Mod. To travel first-class. How are you getting on? Oh, first-class.
