Other forms: seconds, seconded
A second is the smallest piece of time you count in ordinary life — one tick of a clock, sixty of them to a minute. Long enough to say hello, boil nothing at all, or miss your stop.
In speech it shrinks to almost nothing: hang on a second, I will be there in two seconds. The same word names whatever comes after the first — the second floor, second place, second time lucky. Meetings use it as a verb, where to second a motion is to say out loud that you back it, and an office seconds a worker when it lends them to another team. At dinner, seconds are a second helping; in a shop, seconds are goods with small faults sold cheap.
1nountimeA unit of time; sixty of them make a minute.~60%
“The kettle boiled in ninety seconds.”
2nounshortA very short moment.~2%
“Wait a second, I have left my phone upstairs.”
3adjectivecomingComing immediately after the first.~34%
“They live on the second floor above a bakery.”
4verbstateTo state formally at a meeting that you support a proposal.~2%
“I will second that if nobody else does.”
5nounhelpingA second helping of food.~2%
“There were seconds for anyone still hungry.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
second is a unit of time.
Second comes from Latin secundus, following or next in order, built on sequor, to follow, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root sekw- meaning to follow. English had its own words for the idea and lost them to this one: Old English said other, and Middle English even tried twoth. Everything called second is the thing that follows the first.
Proto-Indo-European
*sekʷ-
Middle English
secunde
English, today
second
Built from
From Middle English secunde. From Middle English secunde, second, secound, secund, borrowed from Old French second, seond, from Latin secundus (“following, next in order”), from root of sequor (“to follow”), from Proto-Indo-European sekʷ- (“to follow”). a doublet of secund and secundo. Displaced native twoth and partially displaced native other (from Old English ōþer (“other; next; second”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA