"second best" meaning in English

See second best in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Head templates: {{en-adj|-}} second best (not comparable)
  1. Inferior to the best (but better than other alternatives). Tags: not-comparable Synonyms: second-best
    Sense id: en-second_best-en-adj-Y8VRWDBc Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 27 17 23
  2. (economics) Characterized by one or more optimality conditions not being satisfiable. Tags: not-comparable Categories (topical): Economics
    Sense id: en-second_best-en-adj-aYJrc1nK Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 27 17 23 Topics: economics, science, sciences

Noun

Forms: second bests [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} second best (plural second bests)
  1. Something (or someone) that is inferior to the best (but better than other alternatives). Related terms: come off second best, third best, first loser
    Sense id: en-second_best-en-noun-kKf66I7F Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 27 17 23
  2. (economics) A situation where one or more optimality conditions cannot be satisfied. Categories (topical): Economics
    Sense id: en-second_best-en-noun-aqhHTB6F Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 27 17 23 Topics: economics, science, sciences

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for second best meaning in English (3.4kB)

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          "ref": "1956, Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 38",
          "text": "And so makeshift and second-best have continued.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.