'preliminaries' is a correct and usable word in written English.
You can use it to refer to the initial stages or preparation for a larger event or undertaking. For example, "We will be discussing the preliminaries of the project before we move forward."
It is, by all accounts, a chilly evening in Porto Alegre and both sets of players are wearing their tracksuit tops for the preliminaries.
The hosts were originally disqualified from the preliminaries in August after fielding an ineligible player.
Even snails do, it firing darts at each other as part of the preliminaries.
In October, after nine months of preliminaries, the government and the FARC, the largest left-wing guerrilla group, at last began formal peace negotiations.
WE need a better, more efficient format for getting rid of the preliminaries in blog posts.
Fred Bergsten, of the Institute for International Economics, points out that the Tokyo round was launched in 1973, in the middle of the first oil crisis; and the preliminaries for the Uruguay round came in the wake of the Latin American debt crisis.
Herodotus's subject in his History is the wars between Greece and Persia (499 479 bce) and their preliminaries.
Analytic concepts such as limits, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series (all explained in the sections Technical preliminaries and Calculus) are based upon algebraic ideas, together with error estimates that define the limiting process: certain numbers must be arbitrarily well approximated by particular algebraic expressions.
The ghettos revived by the Nazis during World War II were merely overcrowded holding places that served as preliminaries to extermination.
Preliminaries to the Revolution were occurring, and the new government turned to the church's wealth, which it confiscated as a direct backing for its currency.
In Alaska, preliminaries included the rhythmic mime of a successful whale catch, with a woman in the role of the whale.
