What is "second-best"

Usage examples of "second-best".

Instead, Pompey drew up the second-best chair and seated himself only after pouring wine from the flagon containing a Chian vintage so fine that Hortensius had wept in frustration when Pompey beat him to it.

I was trying too hard, as if I had thought of nothing else except her visit the whole six days, so I wore an old Donegal tweed sports jacket, with one of the original Pringle pullovers underneath, brown moleskin trousers, a good leather belt, soft rust-coloured cotton shirt, a dark-green knitted tie, Argyle socks, and my second-best dark-brown Lobb brogues.

My second-best girl wore the laced-up, exclusionary clothing of 1877, a black hat and snug black velvet jacket, with a heavy oyster-gray skirt.

It was in this same second-best suit, pressed between mattresses during the voyage, and donned with self-conscious anticipation under a porthole suddenly filled with a static landscape instead of the sea and the sky, that he had emerged from the boat, with that shiny flattened look of sailors ashore.

She ran one finger down Avoic's second-best scabbard, which was chaped in tarnished silver and inlaid with spirals and interlaced wolves.

Second-best or no, the big berlin was imposing, with shining, fleshly varnished sides, scarlet trim, polished brass studs, and the Derrivalle arms blazoned on the door.

Robbing the armoured truck looked easy to an efficient thief like Parker, but he has to settle for second-best when it comes to his getaway driver.

The Friday before Labor Day weekend the store's cooling system went sour, we couldn't get a repairman and I spent three bad hours fixing it, ruining my second-best pants and getting myself reeking.

I'm the second-best cosmetic surgeon on this planet-there being two.

The Neidermeyers had a float equipped with a diving platform, and it was there that Jessie began to develop the form which won her a place first on her high school swim-team and then on the All-State team in 1971 - What she remembered second-best about diving from the board on the Neidermeyers' float (first - for then and for always - was the swoop through the hot summer air toward the blue glitter of the waiting water) was how it felt to come up from the depths, through conflicting layers of warm and cold.

Her second-best evening dress was of pale yellow mousseline de soie with a modest decolletage.

The developers in Timber Cove and Nassau Bay, the second-best development, offered them big houses for small down payments and huge mortgages at low interest—.

Given a choice between admitting I was second-best and admitting I was guilty of, to use your phrase, a roboticide, you are of the opinion I would knowingly accept the latter.

Back in her day, the black woman had been an Olympic silver medalist for target shooting, and she was the second-best long distance shooter among the companions.

I had dressed that morning in my second-best town clothes: a navy chalk-stripe single-breasted suit made by my tailors in Savile Row, club tie, cream Gieves and Hawkes shirt, silver cufflinks from Aspreys, Church's black Oxford lace ups, silk socks, cashmere navy-blue overcoat, on my wrist my father's old Smiths watch.