penultimaten.adj.

1529 Bp. S. Gardiner Let. 30 Aug. (1933) 33 At Woodstock, the penultimate of August.

1728 E. Chambers Cycl. (at cited word) Antepenultimate is that before the Penultimate, or the last but two.

1804 W. Mitford Inq. Princ. Harmony Lang. (ed. 2) 268 Though..Latin..can have a long penultimate following an acuted antepenultimate,..yet..long vowels unacuted are numerous.

1876 C. M. Davies Unorthodox London (rev. ed.) 313 He..also leaned to long penultimates in Phrygia and Libya.

1911 R. Brooke in Sat. Westm. Gaz. 4 Feb. 6/2 All of the accents upon all the norms!—And ah! the stress on the penultimate! We never knew blank verse could have such feet.

1998 A. Youssef & I. Mazurkewich in S. Flynn et al. Generative Study Second Lang. Acquisition xvi. 321 They are bound to produce and perceive stress on the heavy penultimate.

1872 A. Cayley in Messenger Math. 1 178 I have had occasion to consider..the form of a curve about to degenerate into a system of multiple curves; a simple instance is a trinodal quartic curve about to degenerate into the form x²y² = 0, or say a ‘penultimate’ of x²y² = 0.

1876 A. Campbell-Walker Correct Card Gloss. p. xiii Penultimate, the, beginning with the lowest card but one of the suit you lead originally, if it contains more than four cards.

1891 Harper's Mag. Mar. 605/2 I furnished to the Field a letter..in which the penultimate was recommended as the proper lead after quitting the head of the suit, in order to show number.

1929 Times 30 Oct. 17/5 By degrees was evolved the practice of playing the ‘penultimate card of five’ and the ‘antepenultimate of six’.

2003 Independent on Sunday (Nexis) 12 Jan. 45 Partner cashed her spades, and when I discarded the heart nine on the penultimate and the diamond 10 on the last, got the message and switched to the queen of diamonds.

1677 R. Plot Nat. Hist. Oxford-shire 15 They [sc. the sounds of an echo] next strike the ultimate secondary object, then the penultimate and antepenultimate.

1709 Barnes in T. Hearne Remarks & Coll. 8 Feb. (1886) II. 167 Thanks for your penultimate rhapsody.

1785 T. Jefferson Notes Virginia xi. 176 Measuring it with that of an adult, by placing their hinder processes together, its broken end extended to the penultimate grinder of the adult.

1813 Ld. Byron Let. 23 Nov. in Lett. & Jrnls. (1830) I. 486 One more revise—positively the last..—at any rate, the penultimate.

1881 St. G. Mivart Cat 99 The penultimate phalanx of each digit..is hollowed out on its outer side.

1941 Bot. Rev. 7 355 Harder (1926), by microsurgery, isolated the penultimate cell of a growing hypha.

1995 N.Y. Times 24 Jan. c18/5 The play's penultimate sequence, set in a boxcar, is a shocker.

1728 E. Chambers Cycl. Penultima, or Penultimate, in Grammar, &c. a Syllable, or Foot, immediately before the last.

1862 G. P. Marsh Lect. Eng. Lang. (new ed.) 380 The great frequency of ultimate and penultimate accentuation.

1880 G. Grove Dict. Music II. 691 The Perielesis generally makes its appearance in connection with the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable of a final phrase.

1975 Language 51 265 The syncope of a penultimate unaccented vowel and the deletion of final shwa lead to a system in which stress invariably falls on the last syllable.

1999 Mod. Lang. Jrnl. 83 450/1 The author does include acute accents on stressed penultimate syllables.

1872 A. Cayley in Messenger Math. 1 180 The figure is drawn with very small values of a, f, h in order to exhibit as nearly as may be one of the penultimate forms of the curve.

1910 Amer. Jrnl. Math. 32 76 Cayley introduced the name ‘penultimate curve’ for the locus whose equation contains certain infinitesimal coefficients the vanishing of which renders the equation factorable into an ultimate form.

1933 Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 35 864 A plane through P intersects L in a curve with a triple point at P whose penultimate form consists of one node and two cusps.