The term Primitive in OpenGL is used to refer to two similar but separate concepts
The first meaning of “Primitive” refers to the interpretation scheme used by OpenGL to determine what a stream of vertices represents when being rendered e.g. “GL_POINTS”. Such sequences of vertices can be arbitrarily long.
The other meaning of “Primitive”, also referred to as a “base primitive”, refers to the result of the interpretation of a vertex stream, as part of Primitive Assembly.
Therefore, processing a vertex stream by one of these primitive interpretations results in an ordered sequence of primitives. The individual primitives are sometimes called “base primitives”.