Word Type
Second can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.
second used as an adjective:
- The ordinal number corresponding to the cardinal number two.
- Number-two; following immediately after the first one.
"He lives on Second Street." - That which comes after the first.
"You take the first one, and I'll have the second."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
second used as a verb:
- Transfer temporarily to alternative employment.
- To assist.
- To agree as a second person to (a proposal), usually to reach a necessary quorum of two.
"I second the motion."
Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →
second used as a noun:
- A manufactured item that, though still usable, fails to meet quality control standards.
"They were discounted because they contained blemishes, nicks or were otherwise factory seconds." - An additional helping of food.
"That was good barbecue. I hope I can get seconds." - Another chance to achieve what should have been done the first time, usually indicating success this time around. (See second-guess.)
- The interval between two adjacent notes in a diatonic scale (either or both of them may be raised or lowered from the basic scale via any type of accidental).
- The second gear of an engine.
- Second base.
- The SI unit of time, defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of caesium-133 in a ground state at a temperature of absolute zero and at rest; one-sixtieth of a minute.
- A unit of angle equal to one-sixtieth of a minute of arc or one part in 3600 of a degree.
- A short, indeterminate amount of time.
"I'll be there in a second." - The attendant of a contestant in a duel or boxing match, who must be ready to take over if the contestant drops out. In the case of a duel, the seconds may also fight each other at 90 to the other contestants.
- One who agrees in addition, or such a motion, as required in certain meetings to pass judgement etc.
"If we want the motion to pass, we will need a second."
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is second?
- Adjective usage: He lives on Second Street.
- Adjective usage: The second book in "The Lord of the Rings" series is called "The Two Towers".
- Adjective usage: You take the first one, and I'll have the second.
- Verb usage: I second the motion.
- Noun usage: They were discounted because they contained blemishes, nicks or were otherwise factory seconds.
- Noun usage: That was good barbecue. I hope I can get seconds.
- Noun usage: I'll be there in a second.
- Noun usage: If we want the motion to pass, we will need a second.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of second are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of second, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).