Extracting the first element of a list

Perhaps some kind person might show me the way to extract the first element of a list.

The example is

tmp <- c("A", "B C","BC D")

I want the first "word" from each of these elements, i.e. "A" ,"B" ,"BC"

strsplit(tmp," ") returns

[[1]]
[1] "A"

[[2]]
[1] "B" "C"

[[3]]
[1] "BC" "D"

I have had no success in trying to extract the first element.

Of course there may be another way to get the same result.

For the first element of a list L: 
 L[[1]]
For the first elements of all elements (vector) of the list:
 lapply(L, function(x) x[1])

Uwe Ligges
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